1 Aug 2013
A chance to make some progress
After a stupidly busy couple of months, the Christmas break has allowed a few days of fairly continuous work on the approach board (that I see from this blog I started in June).
I now have all of the points mounted on the northerly station approach board...
PIC}:-StationApchBoard1.jpg;
The flange screws you can see between the rails holding the trackwork in place are to allow for minor adjustments, the track will eventually be glued into place when the track is ballasted (at least a year away) and at that point the flange screws will be removed.
I want to check that the track runs perfectly before gluing it down.
PIC}:-DaysOff.jpg;
I just can't work kneeling down for more than a minute or two so I have tried to make the construction of the layout as modular as possible - such that I can either work at my workbench or at least standing up. To that end the boards are all to some degree removable and the electronics are as modular as possible...
Thos board is the most complex, it requires 14 point motors and the track-work is split into 15 separate occupancy detection sections. This is because the complex station throat point work has so many possibilities that the required continuous track detection is tricky.
Continuous track detection means the computer never has to guess where a train is. It requires two things - (1) all track be occupancy detected (2) no single occupancy sensors are going to have two separate trains on simultaneously under normal operation.
