Wiring thoughts

Was directed to Brian Lambert's site via the N Gauge Yahoo! group. Brian's site is excellent, loads of detail and practical experience, clearly explained.

I need to think about wiring now, before laying track, as holes for dropper wires will have to drilled for wiring as track laying progresses, and I don't want to make it up as I go along.

From Brian's site, and other readings, here's my basic track wiring plan:

Use a bus architecture for the main rail power feeds. 'Bus' is a fancy word for cable, and it will run around the underside of the baseboard following (roughly) the track main line. Two wires are required (live and neutral) and I'll use the red and black wires from household electric mains cable (2.5mm twin core and earth).

I'll then drop wires from the rails at appropriate places. Probably I'll use the wire-soldered-to-rail-joiners method - easy to solder first and join later, rather than faff around with soldering to the outside (ugly) or underside (easy to melt sleepers) of the rail.

Dropper wires will then be connected (terminal blocks or soldered) to wires that will then run to the bus.

Point wiring can be considered separately, except when track polarity needs to be switched by a point motor. The only place I think this applies is the long crossing. Polarity of point frogs is switched automatically from the switch blade making contact with the stock rail. (I'm using Peco code 55 electrofrog points throughout.)

Questions:

Should I draw up a full wiring plan? Probably.

Do I want to wire the switch blades of points, or depend on contact with the stock rails? My inclination is to rely on the stock rails, as wiring up the point blades involves intricate soldering (with the risk of messing everything up).

At least I don't have to worry about isolated sections, as my DCC decision removes this requirement.

Stove 'R's arrive!

Almost exactly one year ago the N Gauge Society announced that it was producing its first ready to run wagon - a Stove 'R'. As it was available in LMS livery (amongst several others) I paid my deposit for two like a good club member.

They arrived yesterday.

Worth the wait? Absolutely. They are splendid, great detail and (important) quite different to anything else you can get RTR in LMS.

According to the LMS Carriage Society (yes, there is one!) the Stove 'R' was "used on parcel, newspaper and milk trains, which often went attached to passenger trains." It was designated BGZ code in BR times, or CR in LMS days.

The N Gauge Society Stove 'R' was produced by Dapol. Produced in different running numbers in LMS livery: my wagons are 32975 and 32977.

Here are some photos:

  

  

These next two photos show the colour difference between the Stove R, produced by Dapol, and the Graham Farish Stanier coaches. Quite a difference and the roof colour is very light on the Stove R.

  

 

And the real thing is on the Bluebell Railway here.

Southampton MRC show

Completely with an n gauge bias, I toddled off to Southampton last week to see New Mills, as featured in Railway Modeller in Sept 2009. It was splendid. No station, interestingly, but a main line and both steam and diesel shed/depot.

My pics are below, taken with my iPhone. A bit naff but okay. As there was something moving on the main lines pretty much all the time (a good thing!), there's a bit of blurring that a better camera would improve on. Must try harder...

 

  

 

Conditioning Sundeala

As per the instructions, I've conditioned the Sundeala which will top my baseboards. Instructions come with the boards, which I got from Alton Model Centre, or are available on the web site.

First slosh a good half a litre on each board, on the reverse (which I've assumed to be the side with the Sundeala logo on).

 

Then stack them on top of each other, wet side to wet side, thus:

Finally, drop a couple of baseboards on top to keep everything flat and in place.

And wait 48 - 72 hours...

Baseboard construction completed - again

Following on from the previous post on baseboard completion (!), this time it really is done. Cross braces are fitted and drilled to allow wiring to pass through. Here's proof:

Also, here's a close-up of a leg 'pocket' - the design is a fixed leg design with the leg being held in place with a bolt (not shown). I thought this was ingenious design on my part, but found out later that it's common practice. It even featured in this month's BRM layout construction article.

Also, here's a close-up of a board end, showing the bolt hole and alignment dowel fitted.

Next step is to condition the Sundeala boards before fitting, as per the instructions...

Totnes wins BRM layout of the year

I wrote about John Birkett-Smith's Ashburton a few months back - the scenics were awesome. John's larger project was featured in BRM in in 2009 and has now won the best Layout in a BRM poll. Photos are on John's blog and on Noel Leaver's Farnham MRC pages. Here's one to whet the appetite:

Interestingly there was a discussion on the running qualities of Totnes on the N Gauge Yahoo! forum here - defended by Jerry Cifford (who built Highbury Colliery, featured in Railway Modeller Nov & Dec 2009).

Baseboard construction completed

After some serious joinery work over the Christmas period the baseboards are finished. Well almost - the cross-bearers are not installed yet as I don't want to have them under the boards where point motors are to be installed. So I need to complete the track plan, which needed to be modified because of the space available (see here for details) and because of my misunderstanding of Peco track geometery (see here for more details but basically Peco SetTrack radius 3 is too large to fit on a 600mm board).

I've also bought four sheets of Sundeala board from Alton Model Centre to top the plywood boards - I'll pin these down shortly. Anyway, here's a photo of the four boards joined up:

I thought the bullet-style cabinet makers dowels would be tricky to fit, but in fact they went in very easily (with a tap from a hammer) and work really well. Purchased from Station Road Baseboards, which so far has provided a good service (I also got my adjustable feet there).

Next step: transcribe the track plan from XtrkCad to a large roll of wallpaper on the baseboard to make sure everything will fit - I'll use point temptates downloaded from this useful site - inexplicably they are not available from the Peco web site.