chris

No need to weather your rails. That is one of the advantages of modelling outdoors, you can leave some of the weathering to the weather.

My advice would be, if you're building in OO in the garden then don't trying and do finescale. If you want finescale, model indoors. I find it a constant battle with myself to stop trying to create too much detail outdoors. I need to keep things robust. There are birds and cats out there. There's frost and snow and rain, oh so much rain. Keeping everything straight, true, waterproof, rustproof, bonded etc. is enough to keep me busy. I've got to resist finescale.

British Summer Time is over, officially. I've already started making and bashing some Metcalfe kits for the tramway. I've started to put some serious thought into the track plan. I have two windowsills in the conservatory. One is about 2.5m and at eye level. The other is at a more traditional low level and about 5m end to end, but an "L" shape. Most of the time the tramway will be on the high sill, but I want be able to run it on the low one from time to time. The plan is to build it on two boards about 1200mm by 200mm to make it easy to handle and to allow me to insert a corner section between the two boards when I place it on the low "L" shaped sill. I'm also thinking about having extra boards which could go on each end when on the low sill. They could be loop backs (think Fleetwood) to enable continuous running. I like to have a full plan before I start, it gives me direction and a framework to work within.

Anyone one got a plough handy? Snow is settling on Amblethorpe. Will probably take the point motors in for the winter on Sunday.

You may want to consider contacting a patent layer on Monday before you head to Hornby. Best to know where you stand before they ask you to sign a non disclosure agreement! PS. Very exciting and intriguing.

The vids are mainly on YouTube, but we've all been impressed watching it on our TVs. You'll have a BlueRay player so PM IanR with your address and get the best quality version going. morning, Ian.

I think the great weather we had through September has left a few of us on a bit of a downer now autumn has kicked in. I did nothing on Amblethorpe yesterday, I wasn't in the mood. It may be time to start on out winter project, a small tramway scene, indoors. When motivation is low I find it helpful to work on a smaller a project where you can make quick progress and see results.

All six will be in York at some point on the summer and theres far more to do in York than Shildon. I'd be happy to have Amblethorpe open for visitors on the chosen day.

If I was going for RC then I'd still have the track powered. Stick 16v AC on the tracks and rectify in the loco so you don't have to worry about polarity. Have a small battery in the loco which is charged form the trackand works as a UPS (uninterruptible power supply) for when you hit a dead section. Radio Control the loco. That said, I'm with Mick. DCC gives you the same remote control as Radio Control. I can wander around my garden and control trains with my iPad. Yes I need to keep the track clean, but thats a 5 minute job. With Stay Alive chips a bit of grubby track isn't an issue. But if you know your way around RC kit, then fitting it to a garden railway could be great fun.

Hey Mick, you turn your back for 5 minutes and suddenly we are all making a movie Not said this recently... Thanks again Mick for starting this forum and keeping it on the tracks. I've got a feeling that several people have started building their railway just becuase of the confidence they have gained from seeing on here what has been done by others. I'm having great fun with my railway, and now I'm looking forward to wagon cam

Today I get switched over to fibre broadband and will jump form 1.03Mbps to somewhere between 30 to 40Mbps. Most of my "testing" of the new connection will be watching Craig's Vimeo feed.

The Accy's are an extra expense which does put me off adding more points. The point itself costs around £10, the motor about £5 and the Accy's work out at about £10 per output, so that's £25 for each new point. I'm half way through adding 6 sidings in the shed and they require 6 new points. I'm not sure if I'd have gone a head if I had to spend £60 on new Accy's. Careful planning of my Accy's has enabled me to control them all with my DCC system through the purchase of a single Digitrains 2 output unit (£18) and a "cascade" of other units. At the moment all the Accy's and wires are in place but I still need to buy three points and motors. As things stand my DCC can thrown points that don't exist and set routes that aren't there. Note to IanR: 40 minutes.

I'm using standard point motors from Peco and Seep. They are the simple solenoid type, send a pulse of power down the brown wire to throw the point and down the blue to close it. The green wire returns the power from the common terminal. The Accessory Decoders (Accy's) are small circuit boards with lots of terminal connectors on them into which go your wires to points, power supplies and the DCC signal. They look like this. This is a view of three of the four Accy's in my shed. The two on the left are from Gaugemaster and they are using an external (16v AC) power supply, which is fed through the black wires. The DCC signal is fed into the Accy next to the power, the white wire. The multicore cables are connected to the 4 outputs each of which controls 1 point (3 wires: thrown, closed and common). The other Accy is a 2 output unit from DigiTracks. It uses track power and a CDU so doesn't have a separate power supply. The CDU is powerful enough to throw a pair of points so this board can actually control 4 points, but I will only be using it on a pair and a single. You may be able to make out a small switch at the top left of the board, this is there so I can remove them all from the DCC feed without having to disconnect any wires. This is required only occasionally when I'm programming the system and I don't want them to receive any programming instructions. The other Accy in the shed is a Team Digital SM82 and its a beast. It is an 8 output model with a CDU (no power supply) so it can easily handle a pair of points per output. I currently have it throwing 12 points, but I still have a couple more to add I hope to get 14 on it. In the background you can see a recycled network socket. A couple of the outputs are wired into it. Cat5 cables are used to allow me to remove the point motors they supply. There's plenty going under the baseboard in my shed.

I'm in.

Ian gave me a DVD of the K&WR yesterday and I must say that YouTube doesn't do it justice. Watching it on the TV it's so much more impressive. I'm definately heading over to Wakefield next Spring/Summer to see it in the flesh.

When it comes to the construction of my railway, I have shamelessly copied IanR's K&WR, so when he visited Amblethorpe yesterday I didn't have much I could "show off". But Ian is a DC man so I knew he'd be interested in my DCC set up, and he was. Ian is no technophobe, (he left me a DVD of the K&WR, and I think he was a little disappointed that he couldn't give me a BlueRay version because I dont have a player ) he told me that it was simply the cost of converting all his locos that has held him back, so he was keen to see what I could do, and was keener to show him. You can imagine my frustration yesterday morning when I picked up my iPod to find it showing the "white screen of death". I tried all I could: reboot, hard reboot, even a full restore. But to no avail, the white screen of death persisted. Classic case of sods law. I was limited to one iThrottle controller, which cramped my style. We did manage to run two trains at once, but not with the ease I'm used to with an iPod and an iPad. We probably would have got on with a bit of proper oppertation if the rain had spoilt our fun.

So after months of trying Ian managed to find a Sunday where the weather forecast was good enough to ensure that a trip to visit Amblethopre wouldn't be a waste of time. Had a great time, but after while we did get a bit worried by a big black cloud. A bit of light drizzle meant Ian was in at the deep end with DCC control getting some of the stock back into the shed. The cloud passed so we ran a few more trains and then we retired to the kitchen for a cup of tea. This was interrupted when a proper shower arrived. Again it was good to have a garden railway pro on hand who didn't need instructions on what needed to be grabbed and placed under cover. He also got a high speed demonstration of how Colwick station gets moved into the consevatory as Sarah and I shifted it faster than ever before. Great weather forecast, nailed on sunshine all day. Yep. Anyway even with the rain it was still great to meet Ian and chat about garden railways for a few hours.

No pl 11 are none latching. Leave the spring in. You can leave the spring even when they are latching, but it does mean the motor has to do a bit more work. As you may have read elsewhere the spring will rust outside so dab a bit of grease on it.

Depends on your point motor. If your motor is latching then yes remove the spring. If it isn't latching then you need the spring to keep the rails in place.

Just had a call from IanR. He's coming to visited Amblethorpe tomorrow. I'm quite excited.

One more point motor was installed this afternoon and that was then followed by a mammoth reprogramming of my routes. My routes are set to control Accy decoders rather than point motors and with all my switching of Accy decoders at the weekend I found that when I set a route points changed in random locations. Having got the routes setting correctly I also added three new ones to enable easy access to my new sidings.

There's definitely a subset of us on here who are always on the lookout for a reuse option before we think about heading to the DIY store. Good work.

In an earlier post I mentioned how I can use a panel to control points. Today I made some improvements to my panel by adding a background image with text and platforms shown. It now looks like this.

A week of weather delayed the final coat of paint on the shed until Friday. I'm pleased with the result, shed noticeably less humid inside. With the outside sorted (for now) I decided it was time to make some improvements inside. I'd not changed the shelves in there since I turned it into a railway shed and there weren't enough of them. While trying to clear some of the junk out of the loft (I'm slowly adding more insulation) I found some old shelf racking and brackets, they were just the job. I popped that into the shed yesterday, but to my great surprise I didn't have enough old shelves hanging around, or nothing the right size. This morning I struck on the idea of using the pile of spare laminate flooring that's been in the corner of the loft for 13 years. A little bit of cutting and gluing later and I had plenty of long and deep shelves. Happy with the improvements I turned my attention to point motors. I'm adding half a dozen points in the shed to give me lots of sidings. Accessory decoders add greatly to the expense of a point but you can save a bit of cash if you can wire two facing points into the same decoder terminals thus using one to throw two. But some accessory decoders aren't beefy enough to throw two at once and that was the case with my "spare" decoder. My task was to rewire a couple of point motors which were powered by a beefy Team Digital device and hook them up to the rather weedy Gaugemaster kit, freeing up the Team Digital outputs to throw the facing pairs in the sidings. I can't say I enjoyed a couple of hours under the baseboard with a soldering iron… but i'm pleased with the results. Along with saving £20 I've also got some operational benefits. Beefy Accessory Decoders rely on a CDU for their big kick and these take a couple of seconds to recharge. This would not be an issue if I didn't have route setting software. With one click I can change 4 or 5 points and when they are powered by the same decoder there can be a big time lag before the route is set. The rewiring means that some points that are adjacent to each other are now controlled by separate decoders so they will throw straight away and not have to wait for a CDU recharge. Finally. I had had a problem with one point failing to throw consistently. It was a pair of facing points, but it had a Peco low current motor while the other had a standard one. I've switched out the low current device and in initial tests everything was throwing correctly. It wasn't the weather for playing in the garden, but I got a lot done in the shed.

Controlling doubleheaded locos on the twin throttle display on the iPad rather than consiting is great idea. Must give it a try sometime.