Point Motor Refits

Saturday involved a trip to Anthony’s place to run some Victorian trains.  This was the second Operating Session in a row that I have attended.  last session I was Victorian Railways Driver 2.  This session I was the VR1 driver 1.  Nine people were in attendance and it was quite cosy within the confines of the train room, but it was a fantastic day.  I dropped off a couple of coil loads for Anthony install in his Coil steel wagons and I also delivered a dozen tarps of various colours to detail his layout.  My next plan is to make some larger tarps for Anthony’s (and possibly some of the other VR/SAR modellers’) GY and similar wagons.  The order has been made for some green ones, so they will be available for the next session I attend or at the Brisbane May Model Railway Exhibition - which ever comes around first.

Tuesday this week, we visited Cliff’s place for our Tuesday Nighter's get together.  While there Shelton gave me three Peco point motors to try out, as I needed three more to complete some outstanding tasks on the layout.  I eventually got down to the shed on Sunday afternoon, following lunch and a morning driving lesson for the daughter.  I then started to install the point motors.  The first one is for the Fisherman Islands Yard on the narrow gauge track.  I have run two wires from the NCE QSnap located under the northern end of the Yard to the point at the southern end of the yard.  However I have run out of yellow wire for the common connection.  Next weekend will feature a trip to Jaycar to buy another roll of wire.  The second point motor is for track 10 at South Brisbane Interstate and will allow trains to get to the Oil Siding.  I got a bit further with this one.  I have run three wires from the point motor to the NCE Snap-it that I had spare.  The NCE Snap-it was installed under the baseboard very close to the point,  I also ran two wires from the Snap-it to the track bus.  I have also installed an extra push button in the South Brisbane Interstate panel and run a wire to a spare connection in the NCE Mini Panel located at South Brisbane.  Just before I wrote this update, I looked at the code in the mini panel and found out that the location I connected the wire from the control panel to, already has some code in there to throw some points via a 'Link' command.  I just need to move the wire to the next connection.  The code in the Mini Panel will require a slight adjustment for the new siding, and I think it will mean that the code in the Mini Panel for track 9 will have to be recoded to ensure that the new point will throw the correct way.  I will make these changes to the code next weekend.

The third point motor is destined to be installed into a track in the narrow gauge section of Clapham Yard.  This will ensure that the dead end siding on one of the tracks is not left selected (it was previously a manual connection via a push-pull rod) if someone was doing some shunting when a train is supposed to head south out of the yard towards Rocklea Siding or Acacia Ridge Yard.  It gets a bit embarrassing when a freight train heads straight into some train stop blocks in the siding instead of out onto the mainline.  If the train goes through the stop blocks, it is long way down and it might get quite expensive.

During the week I have been thinking about doing some more work on the scratch built 12mm open wagons, but I have not gone down that path this week at all.  Slight lack of motivation.

I think I will be scheduling my next Operating Session around Easter.  I have not consulted the boss yet, or looked at the calendar to see what else is occurring.  That will give me some time, to fix up there last few enhancements (point motors) and then give the layout a once over with a test run on both NSW and QR gauges and then clean the track a bit following this wet weather of late.  Not a simple task when you have so much track to clean.