Hellier Train Care

Well things are slowly progressing. I have now preped the rest of the first board with a coating of pva and woodland scenics earth coat to give it a nice soil like undercoat, I have added soom woodland scenics sun kissed trees in front of the houses along with some bushes and 2mm static grass, the roads on the board have been surfaced with gaugemaster black scatter, and the pavement has been started with the superquick papers glued to thin strips of balsa. And thanks to a work collegue I have the flashing warning lights for the level crossing running of a 9v battery. Well thats it for now, need to get some security fencing to go round the depot which will be the ratio stuff, also need to put more static grass down and touch up some ballast, will post more as it happens.

So I was getting somewhat irritated by having to constantly box and unbox rolling stock everytime I wanted to change a rake of wagons or coaches, so I decided to use some unused tesco vouchers and got myself a nice 6 drawer storage unit, that idealy fits under my layout, which was not easy. Though its not perfect because the stock rolls about in the drawers when opening and closing it, so I also have some sheets of foam on order to sit in the bottom of the drawers to stop the movement, and of couse I may add more if needed to pad the front and back. It is at least making it easier to alter the trains running about.

Well I have been working on my arduino based DCC Decoded and am proud to announce that I have been able to create a firmware update Link Removed . This enable a couple of features on my pcb's which have had slight rewiring due to my silly errors. I still need to correct a few errors (such as a recently occurring servo chatter) but most seems to work fine. New Features include push button programming (in a similar fashion to train tech signal where you press a button and it takes the next address thats pressed) LED to show when in programming mode EEprom utilization to remember address when powered off Changes to come Push button adjustment of servo movement limit (may require new PCB version or control board) PCB Changes Added Reference ground Changed pushbutton resistor connection Removed 3 unusable pin headers Corrected resistors outlays for 1/4w resistors Added GND and 5v layers If anyone would like a copy of my new pcb and the updated list of components requi

So after a bit of time with the Class 33, I found that I was constantly having to clean the wheels to keeps it running, though recently I found Howes (Heljans uk spares dealer) Did replacement wheelsets made out of Nickle Silver or similar (whatever they use now for making wheels) for the class 33 and other 4 axle locos made by heljan. So first thing is to take the bogies baseplate off, now though this is quite tricky, you can do it by using a small jewellers screwdriver set at which point the wheels are easy to access and can just be lifted out without causing issues to the gearing. At which point you end up with something similar to the above, now the next thing I need to do is replace the bulbs that are factory installed with led's but this may be trickier as I need to figure out the bulbs voltages and replace with appropriate 3mm leds and the required resistors. More to come after the wheels are installed.