Mt Wilson update - 3 months' worth of progress!

I'm a big fan of smaller layouts; less track and fewer baseboards to build means trains are up and running much sooner.

So here we are, three months into the build for this layout and it's progressing just under the pace for Rozelle Street, which I'm taking as a good sign, as this layout has additional turnouts and some new electronic gear added. I've now finished all of the track wiring, and have installed and configured all of the turnout servos.

The most painful installation of Servo's, ever.

I was having some trouble getting the throw to align correctly while fitting most of the servos. I opened out the holes underneath the throw-bars to make things easier, shifted the servos and played around with tweaking the end points of the throw using the decoder, but I was still getting that horrible grinding sound in some cases, and eventually, the white arm just fell off, taking the piano wire out from the turnout with it.

Turns out, I forgot a screw.

Or more accurately, a number of screws. In the picture above there is a screw to hold the plastic arm onto the servo, and another to hold the servo onto the mounting block. I double-checked the instructions and found that it didn't actually identify that a screw was required to hold the arm on. I only learned I was doing it wrong when, frustrated, I took one of the servos over to Rozelle street and compared what I'd done there previously.

For reasons I can't fathom, only two of the servo decoders will display the fascia panel LEDs in the configuration I want to; green for the direction of alignment, red for the closed route. I've tried moving the jumpers around, re-setting the factory settings on the decoders, everything. In the end, the servos work, the points change, the frog polarity changes, and there's power where there needs to be on each road. I've locked the decoders to further adjustments, so job done, moving on.

The first train!

With the completion of wiring I got a train out to test how my concept for operating sessions will work. Being fitted with a keep-alive, the X200 is the most tolerant loco I have to shoddy trackwork, so I probably should have gone and grabbed the 73 class, but this will do for now.

I ran through a sequence of bringing the coal train in and shunting it into the colliery siding. It's nice being able to stand back and enjoy the fruits of your labours! Also, all of the double and triple-checking I'd done for clearances for running around and siting the uncouplers seems to have paid off, with no issues found.

I did discover that I'd forgotten to install an uncoupler on the main to facilitate shunting the coal wagons into the colliery siding, but luckily I have one more uncoupler left, so that will be another job in the near future.

Other developments

After much um'ing and ah'ing I've decided to wire the uncouplers onto an accessory bus, rather than the track bus. Rapido recommends 12V DC with a minimum of 500 mA. I've read in some user reviews that people were needing to use at least a 1 Amp system to get the uncouplers to throw, so I picked up a 12V 1.5 Amp power adaptor from Jaycar, and wired up an example today to see if it worked.

An audible 'clunk' tells you the uncoupler is working once thrown, and mine seems to be working fine with the 1.5Amp solution. Now that that's a proven concept, I'll have to wire up all six of these in due course. Another job for the next few weeks, before we even get to installing them and hooking them up to the accessory bus...

I've also come up with how I want the colliery loading bin to look. The main components will come from the Ratio 547 coaling tower kit, and I've assembled about half of it already, and put it in place to get an idea for the look and feel.

Electric locos won't be permitted under the loading bin, but will still be able to access the branch for shunting and departing from the yard.

I'm happy with it so far, but I'll extend the bin and add a covered conveyor belt from the mine, which will disappear into the rock at the back of the module.

As always, here's the overall view. Adding a few trees and buildings has helped visualise where I want everything to sit, and I'm happy with how it's coming along.

In other news, Auscision has announced that the 85's have arrived in the country and will be sent out within the next fortnight. I probably won't post again until after I've received mine and taken it out of the box for a run. I may also have another addition to show off around the time of the next post, but we'll see. I'm aiming to have the uncouplers and fiddle yard done by September too.

Until next time!

Cheers,
Ben

Mt Wilson update

All of the wiring and electronic components have now arrived so I've been moving ahead with the layout again.

First up, I had some valued help from my brother in installing the roof, pelmet, end braces to the layout, which allowed me to install the lighting.

I've installed two pairs of strips of lighting this time owing to a wider baseboard and roof than on Rozelle Street. As you can see with only the single pair illuminated above, it's a little dark in the far corner. The photos below show the effect of the second strip (bottom picture) compared to the single pair.

With this step complete I then glued the track in place with PVA. I had spent the last few weeks marking out on the board in pencil where all of the turnouts are, where the frogs sit and the general alignment of the track, so that once I'd removed it all I could drill out holes for the frog wires to the hex juicer and the turnout throw bars from the servo motors.

Just about everything within reach was borrowed to hold the track in place while the glue set.

After I'd glued the track down and started wiring it, I realised that I'd forgotten to snip the wires on each Peco turnout that connect the switch rails to the frog. That will have to be a dremel job before I finish wiring.

Next came the Rapido remote uncouplers. I purchased a hole saw for this job and I was slightly apprehensive about drilling up from underneath the layout and inadvertently taking out some sleepers if they caught on the saw blade. Going slowly and steadily though I only took out two sleepers on the last one out of five holes in total, and that was probably out of trying to rush to finish. Needless to say, there was an enforced break after this.

I've used Peco Code 75 points and Micro Engineering Code 70 track. Peco is also bringing out Code 70 track and points, but I can't find it online yet. I've found that both brands of metal track joiners work between the two codes of track fairly well. The Peco ones are definitely the more forgiving of the two. 

Above is the Rapido uncoupler test-fitted in place. I had a go manually turning the whole unit in the hole and running a coupled JLX and BP tanker over the top, and I'm impressed already. If it's this successful when wired up I might be investing in a few more of these! These are especially going to make uncoupling under overhead wiring that much simpler.

Also in one of the boxes of goodies to arrive in the post were some fascia mounting panels for the Tam Valley Servo switch. These are the first 3D-printed items I've used in layout building and once I've primed and painted them (waiting for that confluence of spare time and an ambient temperature above 18 degrees to enable some spraying!) they'll come up nicely.

The only downside - and it's solely a fault of my planning - is that I can't mount the fascia panel straight in the frame of the layout due to the way the printed circuit board lines up offset from the panel. I'll have to plan this a little this week.

Before having to stop for the weekend I did manage to get a few roads on the right-hand side of the layout wired up to the track bus and finished with heatshrink to neaten the job.

Bit of quick one this time, but I will have another go next weekend and hopefully finish the minutiae of wiring tasks.

Cheers for now,

Ben