Having taken a few days off to make a long Easter break and absent the family for a few days, I have set about the wiring of the layout as it has laid untouched for too long!

First things first was to mount the control panel and rather smart it looks too……….

Control panel mounted in situ; a gap for the controller to the left and the aluminium strip to the right masks the power district switches.

Then onto the wiring itself, which takes a surprisingly long time…………….this is only about 50% finished!

The two key boards to the station throat

One of my slightly better ideas (you’re about to find out about a less good ones!) has been to make up mounting pieces for the DCC Concepts Cobalt point motors.  These are inspired by those designed for the Tortoise units and work on the same principal; they have a uniform mounting arrangement so once set up the actual point motor can be swapped over if need be without disturbing the set up.  This is what they look like:

Cobalt Point Motor Mount

Nothing too revolutional, but I hope it will make changing these at exhibitions a lot easier as this is the absolute devil on Portchullin.

And the less clever idea?   Remember the multigang sockets I had used on the control panels (link here) well they are not rated at a sufficient capacity to operate the point motors.  I think this is because Cobalts operate on a stall basis (the motor doesn’t turn off, it just stalls when it reaches the resistance of the physical stop).  My guess is that this results in quite high ampage draw and has led to the following:

The multi-gang sockets with burnt out sections to the left.

Ooops!  Back to the drawing board (or rather traditional tag strip) for the linkage of the control panel to the board.

There have been other problems too; the carefully recorded wiring lists proved to be wrong on occassions so I have had to prove each cable run (dooh!) and I found one of the power district switches was defective (but only after a couple of hours of trying to trace the fault!)

So things are getting there, but we are still not at the stage of the first wheel moving!