Lancs_fus

No worries Rich, I equally have had some positive and some less positive experiences. Mostly comes down to planning and then execution. I hope you will find the blog entries useful. I will be videoing a lot of detection and transponding tests soon too.

Paul Hamilton

Perth, Western Australia

What are the lottery cards you refer to as planked flooring? I am in Australia so perhaps we have a different term?

Does your decoder for DCC use have a firebox flicker function output? Most do and that will help create the flicker. Also, try an orange LED instead of red. They look the business I reckon. DCC Concepts do a range of these LEDs I have used before and they are most satisfactory.

I agree with everything you have sent. I buy the 166 five at a time when a good deal presents as they are a good decoder. The Digitrax sound part though is less than exciting on many fronts including my patience and ability to remain focussed.

Thanks Dave, try to keep it neat but there is an awful lot of wires to go under this 300mm deep board so we will see how neat it looks at the end hey!

Oh yes, what the wires are for and what colours they are. sorry about that! The red and black are from the left and right rail of the DCC track sub buses. Because I use occupancy detection via a BDL168 board, each turnout is actually part of an occupancy detection section, either linked to some plain track or a small block itself. The red and black is switched one way or the other by the internal SPDT contacts inside the tortoise and powers the frog of the turnout via the green wire depending on whetaher the motor moves to the left or the right. The power to move the motor comes from the brown and blue wires which come from the accessory decoders or stationary decoders which in my case are Digitrax DS64s and are capable of switching four differently address turnout motors or pairs of motors in the case of cross overs. In my instance on this particular board I have six Tortoise motors all powered from the one accessory decoder DS64.

Hope this all makes sense. Let me know if doesn't or if you are interested in any details specifically and I will post a picture of video to try and help clear up any queries.

Thanks Andrew. Hopefully it helps if and when...

I like the Simplex. What decoder are you using for this one?

Inspirational work - I should stop procrastinating about building my 4mm ones