A Few Points to Make

So on Tuesday my plans for the week went haywire.  I usually have Friday afternoons off, and I had planned on picking some stuff up from PK’s at that time.  But work moved an important scheduled Tuesday meeting to Friday afternoon.  So Tuesday afternoon was now free.  So was PK.  So I clocked off for the afternoon, and drove over to the other side of town, to PK's, for a coffee and and picked up my stuff, and some stuff for a couple of others.  Then I got a call that someone wanted to talk to me about something, so when I got home, I needed to attend another meeting for an hour and a half.

Due to this re-arrangement, I was able to start making a scratch built set of dual gauge points using PK’s fast track jigs to replace my dodgy one, that Arthur kept derailing on, earlier than planned.

So I cut all the sleeper PC board frets and cut the rails to length.  I then soldered the points up and they seemed to work well.  I then started on a second set of dual gauge points that I needed to add into Acacia Ridge Yard as I wanted a crossover from the dual gauge track to a standard gauge track.  That didn’t take that long to put together either.  I’ve also cut out everything for a third set – this time a standard 12 mm set of points.  This set of points is for Fisherman Islands and a new narrow gauge siding.  I'm all out of PC board frets now.  So I got 3 complete sets of points out of the one set of Fast Track frets.

So on Saturday I’ve removed the troublesome point from the northern entry into Acacia Ridge Yard and I spliced in the new set of points that I made. I connected up the 3 rails at the yard end.  I’ve connected 4 of the 5 rails at the outer (Clapham Yard) end.  I connected the actuator up and the point switches back and forth.  I resorted to pushing wagons through the point.  Narrow gauge trains go through on its one route well in both directions.  Standard gauge trains go through in both routes in both directions, but I have 1 rail to connect up to fully run through the point on the curve position for standard gauge, so it is not fully tested yet.  There is some more geometry work to do in this area, just north of the points on a large curve.  On Saturday night I cut all the sleepers to go under this point.

On Sunday morning I stained the sleepers, the last rail has still not been connected, and I am yet to add power connections to the point and also to power the frog from the point actuator switch.  However, the point still gets power from the track on either side.  Guess what?  There was a short!  I looked at the point, there was one sleeper that I think I soldered across my isolation joint.  So I cut that with a knife, applied power again, and all good.  The trains have now been run through under their own power. 

They run well.  I then had to go to my older sister's anniversary celebration put on per her daughters.  50 years married.  So I still have work to do next weekend.  I also plan to re-visit the point that I took out and see if I can work out why it caused trouble.  What I did find was that one check rail was missing from a narrow gauge route, so I added that this morning.  But that route was running well.  It was the standard gauge that gave trouble.