Tackle wiring woes
Chris Leigh found a problematic point and set about fixing the issue.
The house that I lived in as a child (see MR276, page 45) was built in the 1920s, initially with only gas lighting. According to my aunt, the electricity company would not extend its mains cable right to the end of the street where the house was. It did eventually receive an electricity supply, but family legend said that my grandmother found it so newfangled that, if she had to change a light bulb she would switch off the power and wait a minute for the electricity to run out of the wires!
While I did not inherit her basic misunderstanding of electricity, I’ve always steered clear of model railway electrics. I was lucky in that respect, for, as a member of a model railway club, I could always find someone who was willing to do it for me. My layouts were never very complex, so I often got a sophisticated electrical arrangement for a simple branch line layout. That was certainly true of ‘Black Dog Halt’, which was wired for me by Brian Remnant and despite, having five baseboard sections, I don’t think we ever had a power failure, thanks to his belt-and-braces wiring system. Plus it had primitive sound – a whistle and a diesel horn – wired in. This was mainly used to attract the attention of any fiddleyard operator who left the train held at the ‘Chippenham Home Signal’ for too long, awaiting a path into the fiddleyard. It was as much new technology as I could handle, in an era when club layouts often had over-complicated control systems in order to involve as many members as possible. Remember all those dinging signal box bells for communication between guys who were close enough to just tap one another on the shoulder?
ORDEAL BY ELECTRONICS
Ironing the bugs out of the electronics on a new exhibition layout was always a headache. I recall mornings of embarrassment as the show opened and my electric-savvy colleagues struggled to find what was wrong. Of course, it had always worked perfectly in the clubhouse. I recall a rail making contact across a baseboard join, which had been a clear gap in the clubhouse. It took hours to find the problem, the result of a slightly uneven floor and over-zealous tightening of coach bolts.
All that is avoided with a permanent layout like mine, isn’t it?
Well, maybe, if you are the careful, methodical type. I’m not, and my unfinished layout was pressed into service as a Model Rail test track in the days when we didn’t have one. From there, I went on to add the station and scenery before I had even decided exactly what I wanted to do with the area where I had put in a bay platform and a siding that was going to lead to the dockside. But the ‘dock’ became an airfield (MR215) and the sidings languished, disused. All I needed to do was to ‘plant’ some buddleia and rosebay willow-herb!
However, I blame the pandemic and the lockdown for prompting me to take a new interest in the ‘OO’ gauge layout. Blame is also due to my ‘HO’ Canadian layout on which the DCC control has suffered some sort of complete failure which I fear maybe a defective controller. Investigation of that needs to wait for another day, but for now, I have the British analogue circuit to use and it is time to bring the bay platform and the dock siding into use for the first time. It is laid with Peco Code 83 track and Electrofrog points.
So, as I was test-running the Dapol Class 29 anyway (page 98), I switched the point to turn it into the siding. Immediately, there was a short circuit. A few moments’ inspection revealed the problem: a regular rail joiner instead of an insulated one, on one rail of the frog – an elementary mistake which should have been spotted when the track and wiring was tested, and that testing should have been done before ballasting and before installing platforms and scenery. So the moral is simple – test, test and test again as soon as the track is laid and before ballasting or scenic work.
In order to swap the rail joiner, I had to lift the point and adjacent track, with all the risk of damage that entails. When I eventually solved the problem and wired power to the siding, I found that anything longer than a four-wheel railbus clouted the platform end as it entered the bay, so there was yet more reworking to be done. So, while the whole area was a work in progress, I did some basic, old technology wiring, through on/off switches, to provide power/isolation to the sidings so that they are actually now useful and I can run trains into and out of them.