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More coal bins have been produced and paint, weathering powders and coal have been thrown at them. The crane has had chains added and been painted. It's still an approximation but a much better approximation after help from some Midland Railway Society members. Being the impatient soul I am this have been glued in position almost before the paint has dried (the PVA holding the coal hadn't!). With the layout arranged as it is at home I can't see any of this detail! With the shed in it's position on the layout I have to use the selfie camera to get a look at it. I really should stop tinkering with this now and get on with some wiring. Cheers Dave

Finally got my whatsit in gear and drew up a coal bin in my CAD program. Didn't take too long and is probably good enough. First batch off the printer... There are a couple of compromises and they are missing the door release lever and a grab handle. I may be motivated to add the missing bits on at least those that are visible in the murk of the coaling shed. With a touch of paint I think they will pass muster. Cheers Dave

I seem to have spent rather a lot of time digging around trying to find info on the Midland pedestal coaling shed cranes. A lot of them look to have had a twin jib arrangement but there are very few clear photos and I can't find any drawings. I've hacked the start of something together based on photos of St Alban's and Buxton along with looking at what others have done. The cogs and pulleys are 3D printed (what a surprise) and the rest is cobbled together from bits of plastic, card and wire. Thank goodness for strong super glue! More to do including adding the chains. Next is back to the CAD program to create some coal bins that I can 3D print. Cheers Dave

More work on the coaling shed sees it structurally complete. Tiles/slates have been added along with leadwork and rainwater goods. Now I need to sort the crane/hoist and get the paintbrushes out. I think it will fit into it's planned location ok. Onward. Cheers Dave

More work has been done on the curved section to the fiddleyard and both tracks have been laid, wired and ballasted. The curve is still pretty tight. Nonetheless the flatiron, which is probably the longest fixed wheelbase of my fleet, can successfully run round the curves and my 54ft coaches also run fairly reliably. A bit of adjustment to buffers and corridor connections and all will be well. Rather than crack on and do the hard work of wiring up the new track at the other end of the layout I have, as usual, been doing some distraction tasks! The laser has been busy again and chopped up more 2mm grey board. There are 6 identical pieces that are laminated into 2 groups of 3 to make the end walls of a pedestal coaling shed. With the carcass assembled and covered in a stone texture and a fairly crude pedestal built it looked something like this: I can't find a drawing of the typical twin derrick crane the midland used so I'll have to make something up based on photos. The gorilla glue is standing in for now! The building is a tight fit alongside the turntable but it'll have to do. I've also been fiddling around with the paintbrushes, glue and textures in the loco shed area bringing things together. The shed even has rainwater goods! Today the coaling shed gained the start of it's roof. Needs slates added but I have fixed the wonky upright! All good fun but I'll have to sort the wiring out at some point! Cheers Dave

We used that technique for the water on the Winchester clubs Redbridge layout. Top coats were yacht varnish. Cheers Dave

Quite a lot more 30ft track panels have be been built allowing me to lay the carriage siding and the goods yard headshunt. Conveniently I had a lefthand B8 point already built which is the route to some of the goods sidings. I've also started laying the longest of the goods yard sidings which runs parallel to the down line. One of the issues that arose in the first outing was that the down line from the fiddleyard is too tight a radius for one or two of my locos. There's nothing for it but to rip it up and relay it. I built it in a hurry and used 30ft panels which added to the problem by creating a lot of rail joints that made the curve a bit stepped. Most of this track won't be easily seen by Joe public so, having some lengths of Peco track in hand I figured I use that. For some reason I thought the tracks had to be centralised on the fiddleyard board which meant the radius had to be tight. By moving things over a bit I can ease the radius and it looks as though my longest wheelbase loco will just about manage it. Now I need to wire it up and see if it really does work. Of course you can't waste track that is already built so the curved bits have been reused to form the curved end of the long good siding. Lots to do.

Surprise, surprise I ended up building a crude representation of the instrument shelf and instruments! Although it's not really visible in any detail looking at the front of the box something was definitely missing. It's very crude but fills in the obvious gap when looking straight on... You can almost see it through the side windows! I think I'm about done with this building now and have started to bed it into the layout. The crude coal bunker is designed to help disguise the gap where the building plugs into the baseboard. More work to do on it but it's getting there. TIme to go back and finish off some more trackwork I think. Cheers Dave

The leverframe seems to fit the box so it has had a coat of paint. The levers are in the Midlands slightly quirky colours... The layout of the levers is only an approximation of what the track layout requires but as you can hardly see it when it's in the box I'm not overly worried. I've also knocked up some bits of furniture to fill up some space. Again these are 3D printed. Not sure whether I will bother with the shelf for the block instruments as I'm not sure you'll be able to see it when the roof is on. There may be enough stuff now. I need a signalman figure now. Cheers Dave

An hour or so tinkering in a CAD program and 2+ hours running the 3D printer and I seem to have created something that looks a bit like the distinctive Midland railway lever frame... Shame that the resulting print is 30% too big! Resize of the STL file and a reprint and this may be a bit more like it. We shall see tomorrow when I can be bothered to go down to the shed and do a trial fit. Still staggered at what can be achieved with this printer. Cheers Dave

Finally got my caboose in gear and sorted out the handrails for the signal box. Fiddley bit of soldering of wire for the hand/guard rails around the windows. For the handrails on the stairs I didn't really have the right size of strip metal so I used a bit of rail (code 75 bullhead I think) with the web filled in with solder. Looks ok I think. I had more of a problem figuring out how to do the gutters but then realized I could create sections using the 3D printer. Doh! The half round section is extended into a flat strip that glues under the roof. Here's a pic with a section alongside a 3D printed representation of a stove for the interior. Mounted on the building it looks like this... So this is how the box looks now with paint on the new bits. There is a rainwater down pipe but it's on the far rear corner so you can't see it. There are a couple of braces for the landing to be added plus a nameboard but the exterior is pretty much done. Interior to sort out next. Cheers Dave

More work has been done on the engine shed with various colours of acrylic paint being thrown at the roof. Not entirely happy with the colours but it's getting there. Still haven't sorted the gutters and downspouts as it looks difficult so of course I've got distracted and done some more work on the signalbox. The basic structure is made up of 3D printed panels backed by card. The structure has had basic colours added and has been glazed. A roof has been built from card and has been tiled in the same way as the engine shed. I need a pair of finials for the roof so a look through my books and sure enough there are the basic dimensions and a diagram in Midland Style. A few minutes in my favourite CAD program and my printer produced these: Mounted on the signalbox they look about right. A lick of paint on the roof and it looks like I'm getting somewhere. Still need to sort out handrails and some interior bits. Lots to do. Cheers Dave

Bit more work done on the engine shed. The main roof now has slates and the clerestory ventilator has been glued in place. I've also added the roof sections to the workshop and office at the rear and added slates. Looking at photos of Wirksworth shed that I've based this on it looks to have either lead rolls or hip and ridge tiles but the photos aren't really good enough to see which. I've opted to use lead work and also added flashing in various places though it's not very obvious when everything is white paper! Cap stones have been added to the tops of the main end walls as well. It's now down to details such as rain water pipework and painting oh, and some doors! Onward! Dave

I was fortunate enough to be invited to take the embryonic Ashwood Dale to the Winchester Gauge O Guild open day on the 1st of August, a week ago. If was duly bundled up and packed into a transit van for the short trip to Otterbourne village hall. This was a great test of the packaging and transport arrangements. Apart from a few track niggles that need to be ironed out of all seemed to work well. Certainly moving the boards around in their carrying frames is really easy. I now have a list of tweaks to make to the trackwork and a couple of wiring connections that need looking at. I also need to relay the curve into the fiddleyard to increase the radius a smidge as at least one of my locos struggles. Of course that's all boring stuff so I haven't done any of it! I decided to break out the laser cutter and knock out a few bits for the scenic side. I've fitted card side walls to the turntable pit which I hadn't got round to. I need to add cap stones around the outside so I drew up some curved sections and cut them from 1.5mm card. Haven't fitted then yet. I started adding slates to the engine shed roof using a printed texture some while back but I wasn't happy with the effect so off it has come. Again the laser cutter has made the job easier by cutting out strips of slates from copier/printer paper. The slates are supposed to be 20" by 10", Countess, size. You need a lot! Fitting them is a somewhat tedious job but I've covered half of the main roof. This could take a while! All good fun.

Unless you can decode the DCC messages and recognise the address of the loco or consist there is no indication as to what direction the vehicle is moving unless you actually sense the wheel movements. At a gross level the DCC signal will always look the same. Cheers Dave

With an eye to the layout's first outing in 2 weeks time I've been going round the bend. That's building a fiddleyard not losing it! First up was to build the 7th scenic board which continues the main lines and completes the 90 degree turn. I didn't have anymore of the insulating foam I've used for the first 6 boards and didn't fancy paying the postage charge to get 2 more sheets. I could have just built a simple plywood affair but decided to use a couple of sheets of Kingspan. It's not as dense as the other stuff but it'll do for this board which doesn't have much track. Rather than buying an 8x4 of good quality birch ply from a proper timber merchant I bought stuff I could get hold of immediately from Wickes. Umm, not a good idea. Some of this stuff is complete rubbish! Even after sorting through the stack of sheets to find decent ones when you start cutting you find just how bad this stuff is. I think the strongest part of it is the glue holding the label on! Cutting it with a jigsaw invariably causes the outer laminations to fray and shatter. I should know better. I bodged something up and it'll do. The radius of the curves is tighter than the recommended minimum 6ft but I think I can convince my stock to go round. The curve leads to 2 boards that will be used as a cassette fiddleyard. This will be too short and narrow for exhibition use but allow me to run trains at home. I have some basic cassettes to build but it's all wired up and I've run a loco across it all which is quite encouraging. Lots more to do. Cheers Dave

Very sad day. Let's just hope they have golf, fast cars and steam locomotives where you've gone to buddy. Dave

Holy Moses that is not the news we were hoping for! Lost for words. Dave

Looks very similar to a DCC++ EX setup although all the software for that is free and open source. Cheers Dave

It's just over a year since I properly got started on this project. I was slightly hampered in the first lockdown as I couldn't get hold of the materials for the baseboards but by this time last year I had some of the boards put together... For the last few months I've been working on the public viewing side of the layout and it has effectively been assembled back to front in my workshop. For most of this time it has also been buried under materials and tools so it was time for a clear up. Then it was time to turn the layout round so that I can get at it from the operator side. Primarily this is because the layout is due for it's first outing on the 1st of August to the Winchester area O gauge group open day. The layout will be displayed as a "work in progress" and viewed from the operators side. Viewing from this side it is very obvious that the carriage siding and goods yard areas are still a blank canvas. My next challenge though is to create some sort of fiddleyard and links to it. I've still got over a month, just! Cheers Dave

I'm not quite sure why you would need a switch statement to deal with each lever separately but I think you can do what you want without too much difficulty. Something like... switch (lever) { case 1: case 3: case 6: do stuff for cases 1,3 and 6; break; case 2: do stuff for case 2; break; case 4: case 5: do stuff for cases 4 and 5; break; } If you omit the "break" statement the execution drops through into the next case by default. I would probably be looking at either a structure as suggested earlier or multiple arrays to define what is done for each lever switch so that way you can just use your "index" value from the "for" statement you use to walk through checking the switches to directly access the servo ports or whatever. Cheers Dave

My preferred style would be something like the example below. Notice the termination clause in the "for" statement should use a less than (<) if you are running forward through the array. #define NUMBER_OF_SWITCHES 4 int switches[NUMBER_OF_SWITCHES] = {3, 7,10, 25}; void setup() { for (int i = 0; i < NUMBER_OF_SWITCHES; i++) { pinMode(switches[i], INPUT_PULLUP); } } void loop() { } If you have a lot of switches to check you may run into performance problems if you use the simple digitalRead function as each one uses around 1000 processor instructions but I would recommend you go with the simple approach at least to start with. Cheers Dave

Still fiddling with track painting and ballasting. Almost all the track so far built is done, just one length of platform to do. A delivery of 1000 C&L chairs has arrived so I'm set to build some more track. Having installed a bunch of point rodding my thoughts have turned to the signalbox. Some while ago I bought an LCUT Creative kit advertised as an MR box. I built it and it went together ok but... ...it's pretty crude and the more I look at it the less it looks like a Midland box. It ain't like any Midland box I can find pictures of! It's just not right at all so it won't do. I've started to map out a design in my 3D CAD program. So far I've sorted out the lower part of the front and back walls along with the tapered corner posts. I didn't fancy cutting out (even on the laser cutter) all the horizontal planking and fitting it overlapping so these have been 3D printed. To beef them up I'm mounting them on 2mm card. This could take some time. Cheers Dave