Soldering On

Up until now I've been testing the locos on the layout with a couple of pieces of speaker wire, attached at one end to my venerable H & M controller and held onto the rails at the other with my fingers. Apart from the dexterity required to stop the two pieces of wire touching, I also had to dodge speeding locos. Time to Do It Properly.

Express Models sell DCC kits comprising of wire with a gauge suitable for the power bus; thinner gauge to link from the bus to the rails; crimps and spade connectors. The kits contain more than I needed so I picked the bits I wanted separately and sent an order. A few days ago it arrived and I spent a wet Saturday wiring up the layout.

Goody bags

Accepted practice wiring for DCC train operation is to run a power bus - basically two cables with a reasonably meaty cross section, one for positive, the other negative - underneath the baseboard. To this are attached a number of thinner wires, the other ends of which are soldered to the track. I decided to run my power bus as a loop, the ends joined to a terminal block. It doesn't have to be a loop; a long length of cable running to each end of the baseboard will work too. My power bus wires are held up by threading them through plastic loops originally bought for home cinema wiring (I knew they'd come in handy one day).

I drilled through the baseboard next to the track for the dropper wires in several places, chosen to eliminate dead spots no matter how the points are set. Prior to soldering the dropper wires to the track I used a small rat-tail file to clean the side of the rails at the point they were to be soldered. This cleaned off the crud and helped ensure a better joint. Some solder was then applied to the sides of the rails; the ends of the dropper wires were tinned and then soldered to the rails.

Once I had soldered the dropper wires I realised, from the cramped and awkward space that exists under the baseboard, that the spade connectors wouldn't crimp onto the wires but needed to be soldered too. I'd have to hold the wire with one hand, the connector with the other and manipulate the soldering iron with my third. Bugger. Eventually I figured by tinning the connector and holding it against the wire with a pair of pliers I could heat them both with the soldering iron and obtain a good joint. The crimps were then fastened to the bus wires by squeezing them closed with a pair of pliers and the spade connectors were then attached to the crimps.

Knit one, purl one

All that remained to do was link a couple of wires from the bus to the H & M controller and turn the knob. I was rewarded by the shunter moving smoothly along the track much better than before, solely due to having more power feeds which reduced the power losses through the track joints.

There was only one glitch which was caused by the electrofrog point, or rather how I had installed it. To stop short circuits you need to use insulated rail joints, which I'd done. What I hadn't done was to put them on the correct rails, so as soon as I switched the point to another route it created a short circuit. I moved the errant joiner so that both insulated joiners were adjacent to one another on the rails coming from the frog and the problem was solved.

As cabled the layout works OK if there's only one DC loco on the layout. All tracks are live so if another loco was placed anywhere else on the layout it would also move, and in the same direction. The next step is to purchase a DCC controller and loco, which I plan to do at the forthcoming International N Gauge Show.

10 Years Have Got Behind You...

... or more like 25 since I last did any serious railway modelling. Leafing through the latest copy of Railway Modeller I realised things have moved on considerably in the intervening years. Back then it seemed little changed year on year; new models were introduced, of course, but I recall the biggest change was the introduction of Z gauge back in 1972 (crikey!).

Here are two 'Things I Didn't Know I Needed To Worry About'.

Track Record
No problem here, surely. I've plenty of track to make the most ambitious layout in the space I have available (or will have - see previous post). That was before I watched a careful explanation on YouTube by ngaugeuk why the track I have (99% Peco Code 80) is as prototypically accurate as Brio. The sleeper and rail heights are the main problem. With Code 80 track at 2mm scale the scale height of each is about 30cms which is much too high.

Peco Finescale Code 55 is the answer then? Well, not quite. Apparently, as with Code 80, the sleepers are too close together. I've measured them and it's true, they are, but I can live with that and the towering rail and sleeper heights of Code 80 too.

Zeroes and Ones
Ooh, this is a good one! Back in the 20th century if you wanted to make a model locomotive move, you'd connect a wire from a controller to each rail and turn the knob. To make it go t'other way just turn the knob the other way (or flick a switch). Then came Digital Command Control (DCC).

By fitting decoders into each locomotive you can control them individually, even if they're on the same stretch of track. This makes double-heading practical and means the sectioning and wiring that was mandatory when modelling MPDs is no longer required.

The drawback is that all the locos I possess were produced before DCC became a commercial reality. I doubt that any are even 'DCC ready'; when they were purchased it was the era when VCRs were still considered cutting edge technology. Whilst it may be that I can retrofit a DCC encoder into some I doubt that it will be possible for all of them.

So, decision made - stick with conventional control? Not necessarily. There are two ways round this. Firstly, DCC is able to control a single non-DCC loco using address 0; this is not ideal as you can only run one loco like this. Secondly, the layout can be wired to accommodate both types of control - DCC locos will happily run under analogue control. Actually, in the tradition of Monty Python, there is a third option which is to buy new DCC locos, and I will need new rolling stock.

Only Time Will Tell
At present both trackwork and train control are a little way in the future. The next major challenge is building a baseboard, and there are a myriad different ways of doing that, including paying someone else to do it for you. I, however, shall apply my O-level woodwork skills and build my own.