2017_03_09 Hooray!!

2017_03_09 Another Alday and today we sorted our polarity problems and look!! No shorts!!

ok  good news! This is an indication that all is in order. The Digitrax system delivers 13.8 v for HO, and two DCC engines are idling with head lights on, one has sound. Not sure what 0.07 has to do with it all, It seems too low to be reading amps?

Its Thursday and Al and I had a productive day. We fixed the final point which was shorting out the SG in Coal Siding. Actually it wasn't the point it was the frog juicer. Another faulty one, and I suspect damaged by the faulty wiring we have found and fixed. The problem was exasperated because we have spent the last month or two removing temporary wiring and rough track joins and track fixings. Al and I have improved the whole railway, where ever we have worked. But in many cases rewiring has created faults ahead of us in the old wiring. We had a huge win today.

Five minutes before Al was due to head home, I said if their is a short their is a bad connection. Al said he thought one wire was wrong. From my side (the Wodonga station side) I said no its ok.
So we thought it out!  In the main room the black wire is against the wall it runs into the island section on Coal siding side run around to Wodongs. So the black wire is still closest to a wall (in this case the back drop. After traveling right round the central island the DCC bus ends at House Creek Wodonga. Here all tracks are fully insulated and the power feed stops.
the next meter of both tracks is again insulated. This is the reversing section where an electronic device is fitted that automatically realigns the voltage as the train enters to match the reversal without stopping the train. Neat huh?
BG and SG tracks continue into Coal Siding side of room and here is where the short was found. This section needed to have the rails reversed. and I had not done so.
When Al wired the inside rail to black (viewed from his side)
 the short disappeared. And of course that's why you electronically reverse polarities in a reversing loop!  I was really confused, glad Al wasn't.  Its fixed!!

Lets talk pictures:

This one is for Steve Bucton who also has a (much bigger) display case at his home. However I was wondering if he recognized the case?
The case has been perused by many enginemen passing through Wodonga. It was recovered when the Drivers room was stripped during the railway station upgrade. Of course its the Drivers notice board with sliding glass doors.

I was looking for an engine and emptied a storage box that had been stored for a long time, and loaded up the track for one of my viewers who wished my layout had a population on it. ok? what do you think?

Mind you, stuff in storage had suffered a few problems with at least 20 KD couplers which had seized up. A hard grey coating had grown over them, solidifying them.
Also screws were missing and bogies steps ladders were loose in bottom of the box. Another job to do.

This is Al's job. He is removing track and letting me solder joiners to one end with droppers. The original track had none and the joins were shoddy. Looks magnificent now. The droppers are soldered to the track joiner fixing the joiner to the track. This means every section of track has a soldered connection. No mechanical electrical joints here. The only mechanical joints are the "plug in" wiring hanging underneath. This is a cleaner environment, and hopefully the plugs will continue for more years than I have left. The plugs can be changed quickly and easily if the need arises in individual cases.

When I was not soldering  on the droppers, I followed along behind Al,  connecting the droppers to the DCC bus.

From top to bottom. SG cripple, road,No2 SG Passing siding, No 1  SG Main line  and BG Main.
All this track was relaid, rewired and connected to DCC main bus. All very good!!

reconditioned track round corner..

All this upgraded and working just fine. Needs 4 point motors to operate and connect the frogs.

all done all fixed and nice and straight Great job Al 👍😎

Cheers
Rod

2017_03_08 Stop the Press!

2017_03_08  Is it possible?

Pictures of the curve out of Coal siding into Wodonga.
F206 struggles up to Wodonga with the empty tanks which will go back to Spotswood on tonights mixed goods. (my 25 year older version because I cannot find the new ones just now :( )

Well this one is stuck with carpet double sided tape!  Will this be the one? (not the engine fool..the back ground) 👋 This is 5 feet of the 10 foot scene.

F206 lifting 7 empty tanks from Coal Sidings, Shell depot up into Wodonga for the evening mixed goods to Melbourne.

Damn wide angled lenses!  (Ha Ha)

Cheers
Rod
ps  finally got my tooth out. Appears an abscess caused the pain and gave me a lot more grief as my dentist extracted it. I felt great, just a few hours after having it out, so I guess it was poisoning my system to add to my troubles. 

2017_03_07 Catch up post

2017_03_07 
So after an unreported Alday last Thursday, where we sweated over more wiring, and days thereafter working on various projects ......
Some pictures!

Another electrofrog where I forgot to remove the shorting connections before installation. All fixed now, and that completes the refurbished wiring in the coal siding.

This section of track is giving interesting readings though.
These are insulating joiners installed because my return loop electronics were installed on both tracks. I removed them when I moved the electronics to other end of the loop. I have to think this through because as the indicator shows, I still have a reversing problem.
In my mind the separate block to the right and the short (old) reversing section are matched in polarity and should not be doing this. I will have to do another trace with Al on Thursday to see what I have done wrong.

ok almost clean by my standards! Not hard to guess that Mr Schulz and I have been playing around with foam. I was going to keep going, unfortunately though, I broke my hot wire.

access road to Loco depot leads down to Hovel Street crossing. The extra width of the road bed will accommodate fences, telegraph poles and a dirt access road.

If we ever find a way to glue on our back drops, I have a suburban commercial scene for here!

Bulk chux wipes cut and sealed down with 30% white glue.

Ok just playing around to see what we can make this look like.

Cheers

Rod

2017_02_26 I thought it was Sunday?

2017_02_26 You too? well we were wrong it was Alday!!

Al visited again today, as we gradually get all the track circuits up and running. We almost finished Wodonga Coal Siding. We probably could have, but we found another short, an old friend, almost :(
And we ran out of supplies. Seems I accidentally bough home two packets of female joiners instead of the 200 male spades I wanted. Back to Jaycar tomorrow. Mind you we connected over 60 pairs of droppers. That is 120 connectors and 120 spades not including the duds of which their was a few.

The short, was indeed, an electrofrog point with a live frog, and the frog splice joins were left in place. We had a few of these during the wiring upgrade.

I do not allow mechanical electrical joins. All soldered and independently connected. every point blade, point and track section has a dropper. A lot of work but hopefully will give me sterling service, something I have not experienced at Club level till we started doing this at Hobson's Bay in the 90's
Thank  you Al, I could not have done it without you ;)
Ok as it was all wiring today ,only a couple of pictures...

The right hand point and the diamond on the BG did not get finished. Temp wiring removed. Just have to remember how to wire the diamond! Wait a minute I just wasted all that time on the Kilmore East diamond 😓

The last point we wired up today shorted it all out. Here are the tags that we forgot to remove 3 years ago. Obviously this was never connected in till today and we got a dead short.

SG train departs main line , Coal siding for Albury? Well it might once we install Albury 🚂

Cheers
Rod

2017_02_25 Back in a tick.....

2017_02_25  Ok sorry for the long break. Family and disease got in the way.

First of all my elderly Dad went into Hospital and a visit was in order to Melbourne. Whilst there he was sent home and Dad called a family conference to ensure everybody knew his intentions and he wanted to talk about his will.  He seems to be doing all right at this time.

Second thing was about me. After driving down to Melbourne and coming home, I became unwell, and lost interest slept a lot, and could not work in the shed longer than an hour. My patience wore thin, and finally went to Doctor Wednesday last, where I found my Diabetes was out of control.
Had a few good days since then with upgraded medication, am feeling a lot better.

In fact Al came over Friday for an ALDay and I lasted pretty well. Day before I slept the day away.

We laid track, fixed track, and almost finished the wiring under Coal Siding (only 25 droppers to go :O
We also cut away the roadbed behind the trestle bridge to allow for the low back drops that hide the track behind leading to branch station Honeysuckle.
We also played around with Decoder Pro and Loksound Programmer which appears to be running fine on the new laptop. Took 5 weeks to get it working, bloody Windows 10 stuffs everything!

Lets show the pictures.......

Starting with Sunday, helping Graeme Schulz test out his learned skills :D

Added some foam here. Love these hot wires ;) for cutting. Looking at the floor.

Water based liquid nails fixed it very firmly

We decided to cover it with some scrap white board to help with the road, will create a steep bank towards where road needs to go and hopefully some buildings behind that.

Adding to cutting?
Friday

Storing the new Southern Rail cement works in the quarry siding. Its impressive!

SG and BG track fitted along short wall towards Honeysuckle.

The junction at Honeysuckle

The other side showing the BG and SG connection from other side. Also shows why we had to remove the trestle bridge and open up the gap behind where I need to place a low backdrop to hide the track behind the bridge.

And after all this time the ACER now shows Decoder Pro and ESU Programmer. The Fix?
Well I was trying to save space on C Drive. Acer loaded Win10 on a 28gig SSD and so win 10 used 13 gig of it. I added a SD card with 64 gig on it, and loaded JMRI on this card to save my C Drive.
The fix? load it on C Drive, and all works.  28 gig and Windows 10? Come on Acer you got to be kidding!
Cheers
Rod Young

2017_02_12 Some important gains!

2017_02_12  So things are looking a lot brighter in the wiring department.

I bit the bullet and removed a fair bit of wiring and replaced it with about 25% new wiring that does it even better.  Fitted some NCE circuit breakers and got rid of several wiring faults.

In fact I have a much better understanding as to what went wrong! First thing was using temporary wiring, just to get things running...9 years on and I am ripping it out because...

The second thing was that I added new wiring to the spaghetti as I added on to the railway, and my memory let me down, as I forgot where the feeds were, and duplicated some of them. As I rearranged districts recently, the lost feeds were causing shorts between districts and other faults.

Well as of Saturday ,I am now officially ahead of all this, and not far from restoring / buildihg up, the integrity of the electrical system. Thank goodness for that.

A parcel arrived from GB. Very quick, about 8 days posted to delivered

The parcel had received a bit of softening around the edges
 

However it was all ok inside!

Pretty little thing? No wonder I model Victorian Ha Ha much more macho Ha Ha.

I needed a small engine for Albury services, and this one came up on RailPage. It was the right price possibly because it came from Great Britain, and the seller was factoring in exchange rates at time of purchase. But I am happy with this little jewel. Now to fit a WoW to it.


Ok  some layout modifications?

See the high level (under spirit level)
This is the SG and BG track leaving Wodonga Station towards the Wodonga SG loop. Their is quite a hill out of House Creek to the start of the SG loop, and smaller engines were struggling up this hill.

So I took about 2 inches out of the grade and dropped this area back to level, which gives the engine a chance to recover before continuing the grade around the corner where a  >1.5% grade rises to Wanganella

Now the bit under Dremel has dropped leaving NMRA+ clearance above track where Ramp  Meter is sitting.The ramp meter accurately gives DCC voltage available 14.7v and amps being supplied  0.01 indicated with one Loksound B Class idling.

Also the overhead track is insecure. So a support was placed under the pliers and another underneath the arrow head drawn, in front of the power board. The board has been lowered also because the new drywall will cover the bricks here.

The Nostradamus effect?
Tomorrow my buffer stops will arrive!! Lets try to foresee what we will see (then) shall we?

20 of for $100 and just a few days to get here ;) tomorrow for sure!
Click on the picture and it should be enlarged for you Patrick's telephone number is there if you should want to contact him.

Cheers
Rod

2017_02_09 Alday returns 27C in shed. not too bad

2017_02_09 Still chasing faults, but working on wiring up the coal siding.

Not much to photograph today. Al and I worked on the SG yard, Albury end of coal siding. We found one nasty fault that just would not fix itself on a points ladder. Finally at end time, we decided the point was faulty. 5 points in ladder, 4 work perfectly and one shorts out one way, does not other way. Juicer fires and yet loco still shorts out.
We could do a lot more if these stupid little problems did not keep stopping us in our tracks. A new point is ready to install, and must fix the problem.


I have 13.9 Volts on DCC bus. Still cannot connect in the horseshoe curve up into Wodonga Station. But I will simply isolate the section and join it into Coal Siding. If short is found, I at least know where to look. I can then connect up all the droppers. If it holds voltage, on to next section.
With 13.9v at the start of station limits I can start to connect in parts of Wodonga station till I find the short.

Having two of us tied down to this "search and rescue" mission seems extravagant, however it works well, and we have plenty of time to chat, and that's what its all about, isn't it? This old fella spent most of day laying on a trolley under the layout, and Al for once got a "sitting job" at least for some of the time.  We are accomplishing two things here. Isolating sections of layout and making permanent wiring, where we find temporary connections. And their are lots of them.
 Thanks Al :)
Cheers
Rod

2017_02_03 Little jobs and variety :)

2017_02_03 Todayy (and yesterday) we added a couple of corners, started another DCC sound conversion, and filled the display cabinet, whilst looking for an elusive 830 Class that needs a replacement speaker.

I think they look pretty good. Graeme came and one measured whilst the other held it in place. A few more to go, but I need to get a lot done behind these panels before I can fit any more.

Cheers
Rod