Hellier Train Care

No, don't read too much into that title, it just means track laying is complete though ballasting is still needed on the yard tracks. It actually links to the fact that I am now starting to slowly add buildings, the first being a scratchbuilt building to cover up some point motors. The 'Rats Nest' to cover up. So I have made a template building out of plasticard ( .30 thou from work  though any will probably do). This so far is roofless and has a slot in the wall facing the tract to allow the point rodding to go through. The basic plasticard template Now as I said, this is just a temporary mock up, the final will be made either from slaters, south eastern finecast or wills stone sheeting, now as can be seen already, even without a roof it looks much better, so imagine what the final result may look like, and then tell me as I still haven't fully decided what the building will be, though a water tower is likely at this point in time. But now I have s...

Since my last post, I've fitted a DCC chip to the 14xx (quite simple and apologies for not adding pictures). However as it's my shortest loco I've found it having issues going over the pointwork on the inner track, such as stalling when on the point blades between the main rails and the electro frogs, after a bit of testing and installing extra wire at the toes of the points I've found that what is causing the problem. It would seem that for some reason the point blades on the inner loop isn't picking up power off the main rails as they do on the outer loop, to bypass this I'll add extra droppers into the point as shown in the image below.  In the image the red rails are fed from the red wire of the dcc bus and the black from the black wire of the dcc bus, the blue section is fed from the point motor to switch the polarity depending on the position of the blades. The additional wires to add extra power to the points will be added where the small circles ...

As my railway is going to run what I feel like running on it, I have decided recently to buy the new Hornby GWR 14xx, now of course this, because it is using old airfix tooling, has no socket for a decoder, so in order to make it work with my control system, I need to install a decoder. Thankfully hard-wiring decoders into steam engines is a little easier then fitting them to diesel as there are no light to wire in, instead all I will need to do is to de-solder the wires from the pick-ups to the motor as well as removing the capacitor (as this is not needed with dcc), and then solder the red and black pick up wires to the red and black wires on the decoder and also solder the orange and grey (correct me if i'm wrong on this) wires from the decoder into the motor. When I do this, I'll update once more on my progress.