Northern end of Clapham Yard Takes Shape

Well my plans for building my control panels (for the Northern end of Clapham Yard and Loco Pilly) during the week did not eventuate.  However, on Saturday after returning from a trip to Austral Modelcraft to pick up a Club order for 15 x DCC decoders for the Club Shop, I drilled the holes in the two control panels for the Northern end of Clapham Yard and Loco Pilly.  I then fitted the push buttons.  Following this I made a trip to Harvey Norman and picked up an RJ12 splitter, as I need to put a fork in my NCE Cab bus to connect the new NCE Mini Panel which I also picked up this morning at Austral Modelcraft.  This mini panel will be located at the northern end of Clapham Yard.  I will create a small 8 inch RJ12 cable at work on Monday from a small length of Cat-5 cable.  This will allow the Cab bus to be spliced with a short fork to the Mini Panel.  I also went to Jaycar to pick up some more wire and an extra couple of push buttons as I did not have enough to complete both control panels.  A couple of my push buttons just seemed to have self destructed, with them splitting in half.  This makes them unusable.

 

The mini panel was mounted on the facia of the top deck, where I can get access to the screw in terminals for the various input buttons from the two control panels.

This morning I soldered up the common power supply for the push buttons on the control panels this morning while watching a replay of last night's Rugby Union on TV.  My darling wife was heading out this arvo so she picked a small hinge from Bunnings.  What a women!  This hinge allows me to mount the Loco Pilly panel to the layout facia.  I use a hinge to allow access to behind the panel and the wiring.  This afternoon, while watching the Golf, I mounted the two control panels, and attached the common power supply to both panels from the Mini Panel.  I then laid the 6 wires from the push buttons on the Northern Clapham Yard panel and connected them up.  I also cut another hole in the baseboard for a Peco point motor in the Loco Pilly area.  I have one more point to lay in the loco area.  When I get it I will also cut the last whole in the baseboard for that point's point motor.  Four point motors were fitted to various points in the Loco Pilly area, and the wires that I laid from the DS64 point motor controller which was installed last week, were soldered to four different point motors in Clapham Yard.

 

So the last few tasks to complete the Loco Pilly area and Northern end of Clapham Yard are coming to an end.  I dearly want this area fully operational before the next running session on the 27th of December.  I still need to wire up quite a few point motors back to two DS64 point controllers (that I'm waiting on delivery), connect the Loco Pilly Control Panel push buttons back to the mini panel and code up the mini panel.  These tasks should certainly be completed over the next 2 weekends.  I still need to lay the third rail on one of the tracks through Clapham Yard.  That is not such an important task as I still don't have a 12mm loco to run.  I'm still waiting for Southern Rail Models 2300 class loco to be delivered.

The cricket starts this week.  Hopefully we will give it to the Poms at the Gabba.  I'm not sure if I will head out to the Gabba on Thursday or just watch it on TV.