2010 April 26

2010 April 26  Monday    (Page 15 of 35)

Not a happy chappy
crook "as" for three days Maybe the flu but feeling better tonight, finally.

Set the Alarm and hit the Studio at 9.00 AM Friday, with a good breakfast in me, and started to set up the Helix once again. Being on my own this time, I rounded up all the tools, replaced broken drills, recharged the Dremel, ran cords for the soldering iron, found the glue pot, and applicator, an climbed under the layout, and decided I needed something to stand on. Back out into the room, find the steps, go to fold them up, find the strap has come adrift, so go find the pop rivet gun, get the pop rivet kit modify a washer so that it can be removed after I crimp the parts back together, remove the washer, so that it works mechanically, and climb back under the layout with the steps. select a nice piece of used track, check that it is fit to be used, trim to suit, fish plates on, curve exactly to 42 inches using the gauges, go to mark where the glue must go..Pencil?? Back out from underneath, look for pencil, back inside Mark the track, lift it..open the glue, but it is glued tight!
20 minutes later I have applied the glue, drilled the holes into the ply, and picked up the hammer..nails?
Well this went on to 3 00 pm, when I finally gave up, after gluing one yard of track in place, and setting up the other two tracks which parallel it, but not yet glued down... I think I really do hate this part of the job. Too sick to go back in, but will give it another go tomorrow.
Cheers All
Rod

2010 May 1  Saturday

Very early
Rewiring is taking its time Seems like redoing things is harder than doing them 'wrong' the first time
However I have decided that one circuit protection device is not good enough. But to place a 21 watt bulb (Protection Device) in each section has required a fair amount of track being pulled up and re-laid. This was because I needed to double insulate each section. Spent another few hours in there again today.
The advantage of course, is that if I derail or run a reversed point, the short lights up the local bulb stopping that train, but everything else runs normally till the short is removed and the local section again becomes available. Simple and it works.

(Edit March 2013 I am now upgrading the globes with a 5/21 watt tail-stop light plus a small solid state circuit breaker. This overcomes high amps under certain circumstances and also lights the 5 watt element as a fault finding aid whilst the breaker is open)

Found the little black clips at the Middys Data and electrical.
The red is the main ring (+ve) Now I need to run a separate blue wire for sections with multiple lengths of track (as I wire each length of rail in, not relying on the fish plates for electrical continuity)
The Black (-ve) or return wire is not required to be separate.
Seems to work fine.
Cheers
Rod

2010 May 1      Saturday still (but a sleep in between)
More wiring!
Hardest part now working under the yard which means I have not got a seat low enough to sit under the L Girders and see what I am doing.
Anyway my bi-focal's require the object I am looking at to be lower than my chin, looking up under the layout, means I am blind
So the soldering iron may contact the bared wire or my thumb, its a real lottery

So I actually ran 5 blue runs and connected them to globes, fixed them under the layout. Disconnected the existing red droppers and reconnected them to the blue runs.
For the main yard, I gathered the positive red feeds from each point in the ladders and wired them to one globe (rather than a separate globe per point) Did this on the other end of the yard as well.
The short dead end, two at each end of the station were each given a globe and wired into the system.
The platform road, Through road and No 2 road blue feeds are fixed in and connected via globes.
All that remains to do, now is connect the droppers to the blue wire. As well connect a feed to the Goods Shed road (which somehow failed to get a connection before)
Hopefully then I can rewire the two store roads around behind the helix, and that will be a large job, one globe for each track, but none of the intermediate droppers have yet been connected (so as the droppers are soldered to the rails, maybe that ,in fact is an advantage?)
The next job will be to wire up the first 4 levels of the helix. That is connect the intermediate droppers (track soldered already) and as the helix has three tracks, and insulated joiners half way along, that will be 6 bulbs to feed in.
Looks like another week of wiring at least
Cheers
Rod

2010 May 7 Friday 1155pm

I bought 4 boxes of globes!!
thats 48 in all
Have run out of globes...
So my little bit of railway has 48 sections so far
Who would have thought

But the rewire is finally over, now I can start to finish the helix...finally

Ha Ha But that was a lot of work crawling around on the floor for this old man .
However everything works really well. The single dual element globe that protected the system (105 watts in total)
has been removed and that was softly glowing all the time, with more than three engines on the track.
Of course that was reducing power to the track, now as each globe only controls its own track section, I have let the whole 5 amps become available for traction. A real nice pick up.
Ran around the layout dropping a 20 c piece on each section, and the system works exactly as designed. The section globe switches on, and all other sections are free to operate trains. That is only the section shorted out with the 20c is no longer available for operation.
Well worth the effort
Cheers
Rod

 2010 May 22    Saturday

Heaters are on and the house is warm..The bloody train shed is freezing cold!! Makes me think of 4 months ago, when it was 50 C and wishing it was again

So the Murray Railway Modellers Exhibition was another resounding success!! Well done boys and girls. We were very busy both days and raised another bucket full of cash for both Charities and our building fund.
By the way, on Wednesday night they started to move out of the Wodonga Station and into a nice comfortable shed in the Wodonga Show Grounds. Depending on how well we get on with the Committee and Council, we should be have a permanent home at last.

Wednesday was moving day. Not the club and not for me. But my good friend Tony needed me and my horse float for a move from Canberra to Bendigo. So I spent the rest of the week, travelling to Canberra loading up, and dropping off in Bendigo. Got home this afternoon, stuffed!! eh? well exhausted is the word I think
Anyway, looked in on the railway, its still there and the Helix lies unfinished. Maybe tomorrow....
Cheers
Rod

 2010 May 26   Wednesday

Still crawling around on the floor. Getting too old for this
I have created some wiring problems in the reversing loop. As stated earlier I have a Digitrax AR1 automatic reverser in place. What happens is that as soon as the Loco wheels hit the insulated joint the reverser looks to see if the rails are matching polarity. If they are not, an immediate reversing of the circuit takes place. The train continues into the section without even noticing the change. When it reaches the end of the loop the detection repeats and the train continues on its way.

After several days I have found myself with short circuits. Just sitting down here at the desk, I have finally realised what I am doing wrong.
I have a passing siding in the reversing loop.
When I first wired it in, I ran the outside rail to black and the inside rails to red. To protect each section with a 21 watt globe, I have added a brown wire and wired that to the outside track, leaving the inside track connected to the red wire. I left the black connection as is to the single black wire.
Switching on the DCC power supply, shows both tracks have shorted out. I has just dawned on me that I still have both tracks connected to a single black wire, thus when the reverser changes polarity the black wires short one track to the other. I have to add a fourth wire to handle the reversing tracks independently of each other. Normally this is unnecessary, it is the reversing of the polarity that creates the problem.
insulators marked || or |black|

red------------------|outer brown|----------------------|black|++++++++++++++|| This loop connects to other end via a right hand point
black+++++++++++++|outer black|+++++++++++++++++|red|-------------------- ||

Having the outer and inner blacks tied to one cable was the short when the middle section reversed.



red------------------|inner red|+++++++++++++++++|black|+++++++++++++++|| this loop connects to other end via a right hand point
black+++++++++++++|inner black|---------------------|red|--------------------||

Or was it? What worries me is that the main and the loop both reverse at same time (on same switch)
Anyway if the short is still there, the only loss is time, the extra wire can stay in, and I search elsewhere
Cheers
Rod

 2010  May 30  Sunday  Early hours of ...

Trains are again running through the loops
It was one wire wrongly combined in a plug with others that caused all the problems.
After removing every connector, the short was still there. And you know how it goes... You start undoing the bundled wires and you start from one end, pulling them out one at a time, test.. no change move to the next etc
Well, I got to the last connection pulled it apart and the short disappeared. Spent more than a week, off and on trying to figure this one out. Just shows you DCC is not a "plug two wires to the track" at all
Now the AR1 auto reverser is the problem. It is chattering and will not reverse polarity when tripped. Hopefully this problem will be easier to fix

Cheers Rod

2010 May 31     Early Hours of Monday morning

hmm My departed Wife's 63rd Birthday! Sad and the pain of her departing never seems to get any less.

Anyway another big day scrambling around under the layout. I fiddled with the reversing AR1 and changed a few wires from one side to another. Got back under the layout (Oh my poor back) This time a rather remarkable thing happened. I pulled every plug and turned on the power.
As expected nothing worked in the loops. I then connected the red and black ring main to the outer loop of track making certain that every wire went to the correct rail. That is black main to outer rail and red main to inner rail.
Switched on power and drove a light engine into the reversing section, and it worked!!
Then I looked at where the train was, and it was in the INNER loop, yes! the one with all the power connectors removed. The engine was able to traverse the whole section easily, and reverser fired and let it out on the main. I then changed both points and the train went around the outer loop again operating the reverser! I have checked each point and each rail (4 on the loop side) is insulated with a Peco rail joiner.
Underneath every dropper from the inner loop is hanging lose. And to the best of my ability, I cannot see how the power is feeding into the Inner loop. Logic tells me one of the inner connectors is connected to the outer loop, and of course this would be the problem from the start. But climbing up and down many times over is starting to hurt this old body, which does not seem to cope so well any more. Looks like I will be working on it again tomorrow.
Of course in the meantime, trains are running once again, and I spent several hours shunting trains in Wangenalla (hmmm that at least sounds unique?) before sending them back to the yards once more.
After a sleep Monday continues
Edit 1 Just played trains today. Did not have the heart to start anything else, and anyway wanted to have a relax.
Cheers
Rod

2010 March 15

2010 March 15   Monday  (page14 of 35)

Not much on today 
Well it was a great weekend. I set up a TV in the train room, and watched Adelaide V/8 Super Cars. Nice to see the officials have dumped young Jamie as well as his streak of good luck
Yes Garth Tander had the slower car ,again, but his fuel lasted longer, allowing him to race to the very end.
Jamie is a magnificent driver. Calm and relaxed, but you get horribly bored when one driver wins everything ,meeting after meeting. I can think of one worse sport... Oval stock Car racing in the US. Trust the people who invented base ball and gridiron to come up with a banked mile long track, where cars go around... and around..go around... and around..go around... and around..go around... and around..go around... and around..go around... and around.. Are you dizzy yet? Well how come they all pit at the same time and still stay at the front.
Anyway model trains is the reason to be here.

 Over the weekend I installed a long yard at the bottom of the long wall. This yard should be moved to the other side of the aisle, once I start installing the coal siding, which will be the main yard on my model railway. It is loosely fixed and when it comes time to move, cross bearers will be laid taking into consideration where the point machines and wiring are situated, and it should be an easy relocation.
Trains arrive into two roads closest the wall. Engine runs around and it can move out on to main line and depart or set back into the third dead end storage road.

 Roads fit about 16 hoppers in the run a round roads, about 18 in the store road.

 A pair of interstate visitors sit on the engine road at Wangabanga (??) waiting return to Dynon. Victoria sometimes uses engines off the Jets to run trains between jobs between Melbourne and Adelaide. Not unusual to see 930's in Wang on a weekend during the wheat season.

 hmm I need to think about this one.. These SG Aurora cars are sitting in Wang Platform, obviously on the BG, in the 70's 80's time frame being modelled here.. hmm, I need to think on that, apart from not yet unpacking any coaches that might run on the BG...

 Nice group sitting in the late afternoon sun!
Looks like a new track panel is still to be fitted behind these engines!

 Just one more. The S and the 930 will run the Passenger train back on the Up, with a spare CW going on the front. S304 failed at Wodonga, and the pass is being hauled in behind T368 and Y129, which will come off and return to Wodonga, on the Down Goods.

Does not look like a lot of work, but every section of track has been soldered. Every point is DCC ready with a live frog, which needs to be operated via a Juicer, or a slide switch, to change the frog polarities.

Trying to straighten the track, evenly space it, drill out the wiring link holes, point machine operation hole etc etc, takes a hell of a lot of time. I am not a great solder person, but 160 joints, and trimming 150 wires to attach to, certainly becomes a little boring.

Anyway two small sections of track still to finish in the yards. After three days of long hours I claim to have made only one mistake in the wiring. That is one metal rail joiner was incorrectly placed on a frog rail, causing a short, which was quickly found.
Till next time?
Rod Young

 2010 March 20 Saturday     Yackandandah is Hot!  Is Magnificent place to live :D

Trying to use the Black and Decker drill stand as a milling machine. Ok for polishing, but useless as a cutter. The cutter distorted, and the so did the drill stand.

 Not a bad tool, lots of torque, and I use a transistor controller to drive it slowly.

 This is a C Class undressed! As you can see it is DC only, no colour coded wiring, 8 pin plug and it has no space for a lighting board or a speaker.

 See the small edges that match the posts on the untouched weight. They are fragile and broke off. I am hoping that I might be able to rejoin the nose weight to the body weight, but it appears to be stable as is, anyway.

After the nose weight fractured, I took more off to clear the speaker, which now sits clear of the gearbox and the sound should pass down over top of the front bogie.

 The inside roof edge was filed back a little and the side connection between cab and long hood was reduced by half. (see VR body to see what was removed.)

 Test fitting the speaker (surround or baffle) Note the speaker now sits higher and clears the cut away edges between cab and long hood.

 Compare this unmodified body with the V/Line set up to take a Loksound speaker.

 Here is the nose drilled out to take the tiny 1.8 mm sunny white LEDs I will file off the tip, and glue it to the body inside and use a short fibre optic lens to carry the light.
Just noticed how awful those whistles look. Have to replace them, for sure!

 Sunny white 3mm diode for headlight, again using a larger diameter fibre optic light tube.

 One of the few things I actually bought at Sandown Exhibition. This is an ATLAS track cleaning car. It has a working vacuum cleaner inside, with trash sucked into the screened middle compartment. The end compartment contains a can motor that drives the cleaning disks, and grinding wheels. The other end has a fluid tank and wets the crud before the cleaning wheels grind it off the rail head. The motor is controlled by a DCC chip, and it needs to be hauled by another engine. $165 which is a bit tough, however I am really happy with its operations. Three trips around the loop and already the vacuum had started to fill the hopper.
Its tomorrow..already???
OK to bed and maybe I can get C510 running when I get up..
'nite

 2010 March 29  Monday

Hi All
Last weekend the Murray Railway group hired a mini bus and went to Canberra for the Exhibition.
First time I have been, but it is one of the best Exhibitions I have ever been to.
Much better than Sandown, and Caulfield, and equal to Liverpool as far as this Victorian is concerned.
The club is obviously loaded with happy, interested members, who made everybody welcome, although the different rooms were a bit difficult to find, I thorougfly enjoyed the company and the Exhibition. Thank you our Canberra mates, well done 5 stars!!!

Cheers
Rod.

Addendum/edit/post script :(
Oh and a little bit to add to the C Class sound project. It has been a bit of a failure thus far. The Locomotive moves a few inches ,sound shuts down, restarts, moves etc etc etc.......
With a lot of help from the Loksound forums, we have found that the wiring is the main cause. Although open circuits are brought out by the chemical blackening of the frames and the wheels themselves.
It would seem that those plastic "push on" clips are also used on the bogies, and sub standard wiring does not help.
I have replaced all the plastic "push ons" with solder. Removed the factory single strand wires and replaced them with 32 strand wire, and burnished the wheels clean with a wire wheel on a Dremel.
I have noticed that the bronze wheels get dirty even though the new track appears very clean. I am told that this is caused by oxidisation and I will need to replace the old wheels with the newer silver sets.. chrome? or stainless steel??
Rod 

2010 April 4 Oh Dear!   Sunday

Here is one I have not noticed or heard of before....

I spent some time today speed matching my fleet of A,B and S Class engines.
Whilst I was doing it I tried to work out a clicking noise that had developed in two A Class and one S Class.
Sounded like wheel flats and I checked the wheels and to the naked eye they looked all right. So I checked the gears and found the bogies were all pretty dry. I used teflon grease to lube each locomotive as I got to it, but the noise in the affected engines would not go away.
I decided to write a message here and see if anybody else had seen this annoying problem, and if you knew what it was.However....

I continued on and speed matched all 20 locomotives that I have on the layout. Later on as I was demonstrating things to my son and grandson, an engine that was not affected stalled in a difficult place, and as it was a long train, I grabbed the rear vehicle and gently pulled the stalled locomotive back out and found it was now able to run. I started to drive forward again to see if I could find the dead section, this time the train continued through the section, however the dreaded wheel flat sound was now coming from this locomotive. I removed the wheel sets and this is what I found....

 All 12 wheels were marked the same and it was obviously caused by dragging the engine backwards out of the section. Prototypically correct or not, this is not the greatest discovery I have made with these engines.
I now have checked the Trainorama S Class and the wheels a similarly marked. (Interesting as they come from a different factory)

None of my Austrains wheels have been damaged, although the early 80 Class and C Class wheels are very poor quality, and need constant cleaning. They oxidise easily and heavy cleaning of the blackened wheels seems to make things worse after oxidisation appears over night.

For those of you who double head these locomotives, make sure they are speed matched, I am pretty certain mixing B class and S Class seems to have caused one to drag the other in places and might be a reason for the flats? Definitely do not pull the stalled trains any distance B67 was damaged in only a little more than 4 meters.
Cheers
Rod

 2010 April 6  Tuesday



Just so ToR don't feel like they are missing out
Here are a couple of pictures that suggests that perhaps the factories are not quite so separate as they claim.
I find little difference between the wheels on both S and B Class bogies, apart from the obvious gearing.

 These wheels are straight out of the engine, un cleaned. The previous pics of the Auscision B had been heavily cleaned with a dremmel and wire brush, before I saw the flats in the tread surface

You can see the definite flat line on the edge of the flat.
To the best of my knowledge this Loco has never been dragged, unless it happened when double heading.
I do tend to double head a lot.
I have only been running trains for a few weeks. Not exactly true...
I ran two Y Class, the Garratt and a 35 class as well as a T Class and an X Class for a few months.
This is not round and round in a circle. It is a short run about 7m long around a loop back into the station, and a 10m run into a dead end yard. The engines are run around here, and a Y Class usually remakes up the train. The S Class gets a B Class on front and next run it will end up as a Double header to make things more interesting.

Now what causes the flats? This engine has lived on my work bench for a month or two. It has had limited running as I tried to fit a Loksound decoder to it. The flats were heard about two days after the engine was put into service, with no more than 3 hours actual running (more likely about 30 minutes as it takes only 4 minutes to do the circuit)
I believe the material used in the wheels is very soft. I would think that stainless steel is a much better medium than blackened brass, or nickel silver, or whatever is being used here.

Thanks Bob (B.B.B) for checking this out for us, as I think it might haunt us in the future as engines start getting a run.
Still nobody else reporting these problems?
I wonder if most of the people here are collectors rather than operators too?? I guess I cannot believe I am doing anything much different than others here. At Collingwood I watched people dragging engines backwards and forwards making sure they were on the rails, which is not much different to what I am doing, apart from one case where I pulled a train out backwards, after a stall. Another thing I see done on the club layout many times.

Cheers
Rod

 2010 April  16 another Friday ;)
 Seems like things are standing still. And I am running trains too much. Should be getting on with it  
Completed the track work in the yard and stated wiring it up. One thing about running trains, is that you can discover new problems, before it gets too difficult to fix things up, I guess.
Have had derailments causing a short... everything stops!
So I looked at what I had done, and discovered that each individual track section was not completely isolated.
To do this properly I have to run an extra wire for each track in a yard, and along each single line section that taps into the feed wire, once via a 21 watt 12 volt automotive globe. First I must lift up the track at the points and ensure every yard track and every single line is fully insulated from the tracks either side.
 Now join all the droppers for each individual section to the new third wire appropriate for that section.
Now I am no electrician, but it seems that when a short happens on a section protected by a bulb, the bulb lights up brightly, but every other train on the rest of the track keeps running... Nice one!!
The droppers and the extra lines are in place,the insulators installed and now its only a matter of connecting them all up.
The other work has been inside on the work bench, where I am getting some extra T and X Class converted to DCC and working out my next sound installations.
Maybe more to show next week
Cheers
Rod

 2010 April 18  Sunday


Nice little program  

Keep track of your trains

Might have to buy it so I can answer David's question... What have you got?   oh wait a minute.... ;)

Cheers
Rod