KingEdwardII

Yes - avoiding joints on sharp curves is something worth planning for. Avoiding sharp curves at all is an even better idea, although the cramped spaces we have for our layouts can make this difficult. I imposed a minimum 500mm radius on my OO layout and only approach that in siding areas - running lines are 600mm or more. Yours, Mike.

Since I have a signalling challenge to come on my layout, can I ask how you are creating your signals? Are you using kits or are you scratchbuilding? And how are you doing your actuators? Yours, Mike.

If you're using DC, then in effect you're really only needing to power 1 loco in each section of the layout. If you want to run multiple locos, they have to be in different sections, separately supplied and controlled. Modern loco motors typically take no more than 1.0A (OO gauge and below) and so this is the current that you need to supply to each section. This is different to DCC where there is the potential for multiple locos running off the same supply. I always recommend using multi-core ("stranded") cables. They are much more flexible than solid core and are easier to solder, when you have the need. 0.5mm2 wire is rated to 3A (this is equivalent to 20AWG or 16/0.2) and this should suit your needs. You can buy reels of this wire, although my approach is to buy mains flex of this size, since it is relatively cheap, colour coded and easily available. The only reason to use anything larger is if you have very long runs of wire and where voltage drop might become significant. The term "bus" in relation to wiring really applies to DCC rather than DC. In DC layouts, it is necessary to run separate wires from the control panel (or whereever your control switches are located) to each track section. In DCC, a single pair of wires can in principle be laid around the layout and short droppers taken from these wires to the track where required. This pair of wires is termed the "bus" since it serves many places on the layout - and yes, it is kind of equivalent to bus bar wiring. Yours, Mike.

Basically what I do in these cases of joints on curves is to gently pre-bend the rails themselves on each side of the joint. Don't go overboard - you want the track to stay in gauge right around the curve. To assist with this, I keep all the chairs intact until I'm happy with the curve on both rails and only then cut away the chairs at the join. With patience I have been able to get smooth joints on curves in this way. Yours, Mike.

I prefer to use 12mm ply, rather than 9mm. Yes, its heavier and more expensive, but I screw various items to the underside of the boards and 9mm is getting a bit thin for decent screws. It's also more rigid and requires less underframe to support it. As for the kind of ply, the Birch ply has a lovely smooth almost silky surface, which is great. I prefer this for all my new purchases, although I have used some older and much coarser tropical hardwood ply simply because I had some lying around in the garage. The Birch ply is much nicer to cut with my jigsaw. The moisture resistance factor really depends on where you're planning to have the layout. A shed, garage or attic is likely to be damp and puts a premium on getting ply that will not warp or delaminate. For me, I am fortunate to have an insulated and heated loft conversion that was previously a bedroom when my children still lived at home, so damp is not an issue - and so all the new ply I buy is that Birch stuff. Mike.

Like Iain, I am a devotee of MTB MP1 motors, driven via DR4018 units. The main wiring is from the DR4018s to the MP1s and is a 3 wire arrangement. I simply use the smallest size 3-core flex wire for this purpose (0.5 mm2), only exposing about 1 inch at each end. This reduces the wire runs to a neat single cable for each motor and it is naturally colour coded. I place the DR4018s centrally within a group of points to keep the runs as short as possible, but I do have some runs up to 2.5metre or so. The wiring for the frogs is much simpler and shorter since I link to the power feed for the droppers local to the point. Yours, Mike.

Although there are some examples of a bracket being used for main & bay platforms, I suspect that the separate starters proposed by Phil are more usual. I have a photo of Carmarthen station which shows 2 separate signals at the Aberystwyth end of the station, one for the main, one for the bay. Mike.

I can't find any more pictures of the Georgetown oven from St Fagans, but Beamish has a communal oven too with enough construction porn to enable you to build your own full size working version:

I think the first question to ask is how the branch is intended to operate - in particular whether you're planning "single engine in steam" operation, or want a more complex operating pattern. The station is quite small and so single engine might be more common in practice. This might mean no more than some ground frames for controlling things. If you're planning for multiple engines operating in the station, then the single line section is likely to be using staffs/tokens and this would typically imply a signal box somewhere near the bridge at the station throat. Another question regarding the level crossing is whether it would be gated or not. Its position implies relatively low usage by trains and there are examples of ungated crossings where the road involved is also relatively minor. If the road is more substantial, then the crossing might be gated and operated from a nearby small hut and/or a ground frame - I have seen a couple of examples of this kind in the book on the East Somerset and Cheddar Valley Railways. Mike

St Fagan's museum outside Cardiff might give you some ideas for buildings, although the number of valleys buildings is limited. They have a bakehouse: https://museum.wales/stfagans/buildings/bakehouse/ A set of terraced houses: https://museum.wales/stfagans/buildings/rhydycar/ A somewhat grand shop: https://museum.wales/stfagans/buildings/gwalia/ A workmen's institute: https://museum.wales/stfagans/buildings/oakdale/ (the last kind of building could be very large - certainly the one I knew in Aberaman in the Cynon Valley was a very substantial building) Perhaps something more like the Saddler's Workshop would be suitable: https://museum.wales/stfagans/buildings/saddlers_workshop/ Mike

Knowing something of the valleys in the era of my parents youth, I would say that the most likely building would be a chapel. You could hardly get away from them - there was one plonk in the middle of my grandparents' relatively small street. If not a chapel, then perhaps an establishment serving the alternative religion - a pub. They too were all over the place, often very simple "single room" affairs in buildings little bigger than a typical valleys house. Sadly, both kinds of place have by and large disappeared in modern times. If you want something of a business, then a small engineering works would be appropriate. Yours, Mike

Wordsmith, For my layout, where the baseboards are basically 600mm (2ft) wide around a room, I simply ran a power bus around the outside of the baseboards and an accessory bus around the inside and then ran wires off those where necessary. I didn't plan too much in advance since the final positioning of droppers, point motors etc was decided as I laid the track - and taking into account the positions of supporting timbers and other obstacles. For example, in some cases I reversed the orientation of point motors to make it easier to attach the wires. If you use electrofrog points as I do, there are insulating joiners all over the place and a consequent need for a lot of droppers to the track, even where you're able to lay long sections of flexitrack. Plus, for the future I plan to have occupancy detection and for that there is a need to ensure separate droppers for each track section and for the isolation of each track section - and so yet more insulating joiners! What point motors are you planning to use? Mike.

fffrank, I too am a dedicated Mac user and also a bit of a skinflint, so I use XTrackCAD for layout planning, which is free to download and install: http://xtrkcad-fork.sourceforge.net/Wikka/DownloadInstall It also supports Windows & Linux. It is a bit quirky and takes a bit of getting used to, but for my OO gauge layout, I have found it very useful. It lets you play around with your track plan and make adjustments quite rapidly. I have also been able to use the plan to actually lay the track, by printing out my "final" plan at 1:1 and sticking down the printouts on my baseboards. Mike.

“In defence of WiFi” I have a background in the IT industry so I feel obliged to say something on this topic… My original remark about lack of WiFi is addressed primarily at the connection from a Command Station to a Computer – which I think is the main purpose of the Ethernet connection on the mc2. For compute devices, WiFi is most certainly mainstream. The reason why can be understood from these graphs: https://www.statista.com/statistics/272595/global-shipments-forecast-for-tablets-laptops-and-desktop-pcs/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/263437/global-smartphone-sales-to-end-users-since-2007/ The compute world is now dominated by mobile devices of one kind or another. One of their key features is being able to operate without wires attached. WiFi enables this for communications – and even users of 4G and 5G smartphones still make a lot of use of WiFi. WiFi allows good communication in places where it might be inconvenient or difficult to run cables. My own house is fully wired with Cat5E cables and RJ45 wall sockets, but only 1 connection of more than a dozen uses the cabling – and that is the connection from my main router at the front of the house to a secondary WiFi access point at the rear, needed to deal with a thick WiFi-killing double skinned wall which runs across the centre of the house. All my many devices use WiFi – and they do so reliably. This includes the Pi 400 system I recently bought to help control my layout. I and my colleagues run our professional lives over WiFi, including long Zoom and video calls. We expect it to work – and it does. My broadband connection to the house and my electricity supply are less reliable than my WiFi (I live in the country) and I have backups for each of those. Yes, WiFi can in practice be unstable, but like any technology, that is generally because it is not being used correctly. It is possible to make it work well, even in very busy environments like conference centres and exhibition halls – but it does require the correct equipment, properly configured. As for handsets – surely here is a prime case for wireless operation? Who really wants to use a handset with a cable snaking out of the end of it, just ripe to get tangled or trodden on? I certainly aim to get a wireless handset, just like I made the move from my revered static 1970s H&M Duette controller to a wired handset. To deal with unreliable WiFi such as you might find at an exhibition hall, I suggest that a good approach is to take your own WiFi with the layout and not rely on someone else’s dodgy system. WiFi routers can be remarkably small and inexpensive. As an example, it is possible to implement one with the latest Raspberry Pi, so combining the WiFi router with computer capabilities for controlling the layout. Mike.

Well, perhaps, although it depends on what you're trying to achieve. But my main point is that these days WiFi is mainstream and an important mechanism for freeing kit from cables. Even the latest £35 Raspberry Pi 4 has WiFi as standard, which I think shows that it is not an expensive feature to include. Mike.

Interesting. Seems to support almost everything - but with ££££ to match! - or rather €€€€ ;-) The output at 6.5A seems to aim at the larger layout with many locos active simultaneously. One item that slightly disappoints is the lack of WiFi support - they have included Ethernet for computer connection which is good, but you would have to connect it through a router to get WiFi, which limits its flexibility somewhat. I note that the (much cheaper) Digikeijs DR5000 does include WiFi. Mike.

I think that the word "butty" has a longer and more venerable history than "buddy", which is a johnny-come-lately from the USA in the 19th century. "butty" - meaning "friend" or "companion" - was very much used in the Wales of my youth, often shortened to "butt", and is also used in parts of the west of England, so I am informed. My great uncles also talked about it being used in the context of coal-face miners who worked in pairs. I can certainly appreciate how "butty" came to be applied to a companion boat as described here... Mike.

I said right at the start that the DR5013 is a complex beastie ;-) The manual shows 6 different configurations - and those are just the simple cases! Digikeijs also under-explain the setup and programming. Given that the fault moves with a particular DR5013 unit, then it seems most likely to me that this particular unit is faulty or is misconfigured. Since you have other DR5013 units to swap it with, Paul, I would start with that and consider returning the unit that is causing the trouble for a replacement. Digikeijs might like to fathom the nature of this failure to ensure that it does not recur on other units. My own preference for the DR5013 setup is to use the configurations with sensing track sections and avoid the idea of ever having a short which must be detected in order to flip the track polarity (i.e. one of configurations 3 - 6 in the manual). But that is clearly more complex in wiring and configuration... Mike.

You will need 2 x SPDT switches. There are 3 frogs but 2 of them are fed through a single wire and switch together. Mike.

Paul, Thanks for your last post - this was the kind of detail I was hoping to see relating to the DR5013. So, to put it simply, you are using the DR5013 in the mode shown in 5.2 of the manual - i.e. "short circuit detection" + "LocoNet connection". Is that correct? Mike

I have a Gaugemaster Prodigy Advance2 and it has worked well for me, although flipping between loco control and accessory control (points) on the handset is a bit clunky. However, going forward, I want computer control - and the PA2 is not so good for that. First, there is the £60 or so just for the computer connection cable. Second, the PA2 does not have a great story when it comes to occupancy detection and feedback. So I am heading down the Digikeijs route for the future - I have had very good experience with their DR4018 point control units. The Digikeijs 5000 seems a very open kind of controller and they have computer control built in to their thinking. I have already acquired a Raspberry Pi 400 as the basis for my computer control and I am in the process of selecting a largish (22 inch or so) touch screen to go with that, which will become the control panel.

Yes - neatly done to eliminate the reverse curves. The irony is that with the available Streamline points, the overall effect is to tighten the overall curvature of the tracks - but perhaps that is appropriate for a layout designed for such a small space. Mike.

1) SL-89 large radius straight points = 1524mm / 60 inches 2) SL-98 large radius Y points = 1828mm / 72 inches I've attached a file which is my gospel for Peco point geometry (not created by me as the page headers indicate...!) Mike. Peco_turnout_dimensions.pdf

The Digikeijs DR5013 is a very complex piece of kit. Can you say more about how you have it connected to your layout and how you have it configured? Yours, Mike.

Now the fun starts ;-)