2021_06_30 Valences and Diamonds

2021 06 30  Painting the valences and more electrical probs.

First coat of green paint.  Forgot to do this last year... Too much going on, I guess?

The new area looks great too. However its patchy and needs a second coat.

I just discovered another wiring fault.  These three diamond crossings are insulfrogs.   They actually power route and dont require insulating joiners or special wiring. (Unlike the electro frogs I used elsewhere.  :(

The blue (+ve) and orange (-ve) wire into BG circuit. The green (+ve) and yellow (-ve)  wire into SG circuits ...  another cross feed discovered! 

The other code 75 diamonds were electrofrogs and need to be wired differently. and they look much better as well.

Cheers

Rod

2021_06_25 More scenery!

 2021_06_25 Graeme adds to the scenery.

As to the wiring?   Its still ongoing but I am working it out and the finish is in sight :)

Cheers

Rod

2021_06_13 New Video

 2021_06_13 We finally beat out problems at Wodonga Station :D

You can go full page view!

Looks like we need to rewire the top level next :(

Still need to install yard point motors and connect up the yard. But that will be easy compared with what we have just gone through.

Cheers

Rod

2021_06_05 May update (late again)

 2021_06_05  A little bit of this and a lot of that again :(

Al wasn't here today, however Graeme and I did feel his presence as we munched on his supplied sausage rolls. Thanks Al :D

So Graeme was thinking about the branch line scenery.

Styrofoam carved with a hot wire is covered with paper towels, and the rail line is moved to allow room for the new lever frame, which will recess into area in front of the turn table.

The hills and cutting start to come together.

Meanwhile I bit the bullet and attacked the wiring at Wodonga and towards the Wodonga SG loop.

The new plan was to disconnect all the droppers and cut out the bus lines and install new bus feeds. Under here we had a spider web of 6 bus lines serving no real purpose. Now I am installing just two bus lines. One for BG and other for SG. This will allow me to set up a second command station (booster) supplies 8 amps to each system. A third bus will be installed for the Branch Line. Now surely 24 amps is overkill?  However I use a lot of Tam Valley and other DCC gear. We will see.

After cutting out the old bus lines, I threaded the first two bus wires into Wodonga and attached the BG droppers to it.

In the meantime, Graeme was hard at work, developing his scenery. This section will be filled with plaster and covered in sculpture mould and then hand formed into a rock wall (I think?)

Had to move the rail line in towards the T/T to allow the new lever frame to recess into board and not be as intrusive as the old frame is today.

A little further on.

Its a 2% grade on a curve, and its a nice cutting, I think.

Well still plodding on, and we have seen progress in the last month. Thank goodness.

The wiring is finally starting to move forward, and we are able to run trains once more.

Cheers

Rod

2021_05_05 Is this a "eureka" moment?

2021_05_05  After months of failures electrically, is it possible that I have found the fault? 

My rather unique wiring design may have actually become unraveled those many months ago, when I decided to replace my stop lamp circuit protectors with NCE  EB1 circuit breakers.  And looking back over this blog, the timing is about right.

And so today I am going to attempt to fix  those circuit breakers by separating and isolating the whole BG system from the SG system.

The idea is to run two 8 amp Digitrax controllers  by adding a booster (again) The booster will run the entire SG system after I disconnect it from the first command station.

Some pictures.

After separating the BG track from the common black (-ve) track circuits, I had run a new bus to this board. As you can see the main power bus arrives at the top and divides into 4 circuit breakers. So BG and SG circuits share a common feed. Each pair of EB1 breakers controls a track section which consists of one or more BG tracks and one or more SG tracks In this case the top two EB 1's run the entire Coal Siding and the bottom two run the double track main between the Coal siding and Wodonga.

I was thinking this last section was two short to have its own circuit breakers and I was about to add Wodonga into this circuit, when I noticed that the black (-ve) was actually not protected from a short, and in fact was reintroducing the common black (-ve)  to the system.

The back of the board shows the electronics on top and through connection on the bottom. 

The through connections marked with black dots are directly connected together thus bypassing the circuit protection.

And so it all starts again!  Obviously I have little electronics training, and just learnt enough to be dangerous.

Cheers

Rod

2021_05_03 April Update

 2021_05_03  Some video and updates

Greetings! Thank goodness for the air conditioner.  Its cold and its now hailing outside.

Here is a short video of trains testing out the upgraded wiring at Badaginnie.

Al and I have been busy installing servo point machines, and in particular, tuning them to work properly. We seem to have that working ok, now. 

And of course I am still upgrading the DCC Bus trying to get the last few sections running properly.

As well Graeme attended on Saturday and we spent some time planning scenery on the new helix.

Some pictures?

So here we are trying to figure out how to connect all this with some scenery!

I like how it's all shaping up :D

And looking above this tunnel, we can link in with Honeysuckle.

Left the door open and the cat decided to inspect the Railway.  (in fact she spent about 10 minutes in there terrifying a small bird that could not find its way out)

The interesting part is that not one vehicle got derailed or knocked over. She is so sure footed and I am so lucky, because I could not catch her. :D

Cheers  

Rod

2021_03_14 Track Work

 2021_03_14  Running repairs, and a good pussy!

And starting with the cat. She snook in a night or two back and when I opened the door in the morning, actually thanked me for letting her out.  (My HERO!!) unexpected that.

Of course I was worried about what I would find. However apart from a few wagons derailed, no real damage.

I found a puddle and cleaned that up, but then found how she was trying to get herself out. She was going to dig herself out Ha Ha. Probably saved the trains by keeping her occupied.

She had been on the desk, trying to reach the window, I see.

Tried to install some point levers, finished up fixing up a double slip :(

The throw bar broke and was replaced with some circuit board.

And then I found a dead spot between House Creek and Wodonga Station.  The problem was that I had not attached droppers, and relied on mechanical connections. Ah well, it will be fixed, and whilst I am at it, I will increase the length of the reversing section all the way to the points at Wodonga. Will now hold 50 bogies on the SG and about 45 on the BG,

Have been running trains on the layout for over a week. And that's really good news for us. Its been a long time coming. The reversing loop here at Wodonga was preventing long trains from running. And several other places have bad connections. Some points need juicers or connections to the live frogs.

But things are looking very good at the moment. Now we can start on the scenery. :D

Cheers

Rod

2021_03_07 More point motors! plus Taiwan to Aus in 10 days!

 2021_03_07  Thursday workday with Al and Saturday with Graeme and Al

On Thursday Al came over to help with wiring and point motors. Its just too hard for me to work under the layout doing wiring or installing motors, and to constantly get up off my back, to locate the wiring, or to see if the points are working correctly, before I screw them home in their best position.

In a few days, Al's son is coming to visit and we decided to have an extra work day on Saturday, to see if we could get a train to run the whole layout. We needed to find one persistent short I introduced fixing other problems.

It seems like it worked, and I am about to spend today tidying up and testing everything. The good news is that so far this morning, I have placed sound locos around the layout drawing about 3.0 amps and the Digitrax system has stayed up for over two hours (the fault was shutting us down within 3 mins!)

Also on Saturday, Graeme came across to design some scenery and fascia, around the top of the helix, where the escape road points and connection to the top level SG track was recently finished.

ok some pictures should tell the story.

At this stage, we had run out of ANE point motors, and so I raided the Tortoise stack, which was reserved for semaphore signal and lever frame work being done by Tony McKenzie under a signalling contract.

Al finally got a sit down job, whilst I was underneath stringing the wires to the control panel and attaching the motors.

And after that the "postie" arrived with my new order of ANE point motors. How about that!  less than 14 days and I ordered them on a weekend to boot :) They are an upgraded version, but mechanically the same. Now all I got to do,is put them all together

And so when we vacated the corner, Graeme moved in to install some new facia and prepare the branchline for scenery...   woohoo!

I guess the outriggers are in position.

The fascia is leveled up and tacked in. Found some tunnel mouths.

And finally!!  a lot of ugliness is covered up!!   

 This is where McKenzie will fit a lever frame. Which will replace the existing one at Honeysuckle.

Helps introduce some contours and slightly widens the area. I can see a road here now :)

Cheers

Rod

2021_03_01 Point Motors and Switching!

 2021_03_01 Points and switches

Last Thursday Al and I spent the day fitting DCC Concepts point motors and wiring them to a proposed signal panel. and Saturday and Sunday after buying the DPDT switches from "Jaycar", I started wiring them up.

The point motors have two SPDT switches built in, one of which will be used to set polarity of the frogs, and the other will be used to operate signals in the future. 

One drawback I have found (actually two) is that you cannot center the action without power. Thus the 9v battery in the picture. Connecting cables is easy. Simply push the wire in after depressing a button.

Unfortunately, I have had 12 of these  devices in storage for about 12 years. Of the 12, only 8 actually worked. I had to reheat all the solder tabs seen in the picture and after a few wasted hours I managed to get two of them working and two needed to be binned.

I found some picture frames at reject shop. I removed backing and glass, and cut out a perspex panel, to replace glass. At $5 it saved a lot of work.

Jaycar supplied the DPDT switches at $3.75 less trade discount.

I tried to draw out a representation of the area controlled by the motors.  This was drawn on the protecting paper fixed to the perspex.

The switches were fitted into the perspex where marked. Down being straight road and up being diverge.

Panel was screwed into side of layout. Not sure if that was a good idea, but I strengthened the frame with solid angle brackets, seen above

12v Positive and Negative connections all soldered in and connected, with heavier feeds for power connection. Now all I got to do is make it look neat :(

To drill out the perspex, I needed to find a way to drill out the holes without chipping the perspex. So I went to Duck Duck Go, my new favorite search engine. They suggested using the drill  fitted into the Ryobi, and lubricated with soap, which is in the onion bottle :) And every hole was clean, and not one of them cracked the perspex. WOO HOO!!

All the cables running from the point motors arrived behind the panel, were numbered to match the numbers on the panels, and the connections were made.

All I have to do now is connect in the crossovers. That is two point motors need to be operated from one switch, to cross trains through. Need to work out which wire connects where? I suspect the wires will cross to the second motor.

When the panel is tested and working, I will mark out the underside of the perspex and line the track diagram with white tape. Then paint the back of the panel black. This should look the part :)

Then tidy up the wires....

Cheers

Rod