Clapham Yard is Almost Complete

On Friday evening this week, I was lucky enough to get along to another great night at Simon Says Hobbies and Games.  First Friday of the month is modelling night.  Not many of us but we had a good time.  While there I was working on building a couple of small detail items to go with my Murwillumbah Cement Silo scene.  Another model railway guys, Darren was there working on some buildings.  I finished off three items during the night.  I just need to paint these and try and install on the diorama in the next few weeks. 

This weekend as usual I managed to spend some time in the shed in the afternoon of both days.  On Saturday I spent time wiring track jumper leads to the various track sections to ensure that the northern end of Clapham Yard had power.  I also added the new route to the small control panel located at the northern end of the yard, by drilling a hole for a new push button and wiring the new push button up to the common power and connecting the other pole of the button back to input #19 in the mini-panel.  I also replaced the narrow gauge diverging track at the northern end with another one and made a few adjustments to it and it now seems that the 12mm wagons all go through there with no issues.

Today I updated the NCE Mini-panel located underneath Loco Pilly with the new codings to ensure that the points at the northern end of the yard, connected to the northern control panel all throw correctly.  Upon testing the three narrow gauge buttons, they threw the wrong points – Doh!  That was quickly fixed and then I found out that one point that controlled the northern end of the yard for selecting track 1 or track 2, only threw in one direction.  So I found that the common on the point motor had come adrift.   I then fixed up the point throw for selecting track 3 or track 4 that is provided via a long linkage that was not working last weekend.  So that was realigned, tension on the screws holding the point motor base to the baseboard were loosened and after a few tests and slight adjustments, everything was tested again and it is now all working. 

I thought I would then trial a train through the northern end of the entry to Clapham Yard and everything work well except that my 12mm loco derails in the narrow gauge to standard gauge diverging track.  The 12mm wagons seem to go through OK.  Bugger!

So it seems I might have to buy a Tillig divergent track to fix that, instead of using one of the ones that I made.  That will be a bugger as the third rail is on the opposite side with the Tillig track.  I might set back up a test section with the piece of track I removed and some track at each end and test the narrow gauge loco through that section again on the work bench.  I did some fine tuning to that yesterday and it now works better than it did on the layout.  It used to derail the 12 mm wagons due to a small section of track being just about 1mm too long.  This was the reason I removed it yesterday.

There are still some sections of track on the 12mm that need some fine tuning.  These are sections where I have hand made my own 12mm track and the track is on a curve.  So my gauge widening was either too much or too little.  Sometimes I just thing it would have been easier to just use standard dual gauge flex track, but the cost was going to send me bankrupt.  So I might purchase a couple of small lengths of dual gauge track and just blend it in with my home made versions for optimal layout performance.

Only two weeks until the Modelling the Railways of Queensland Convention and I will be presenting a talk on Operations on Cassino, and then following up by doing some fencing work on a module from Giligulgul during the day.