Miskatonic Railway Blog

Contractual dependencies need to be  mapped which will control the way some of the points operate.

For example, points 2 & 3 have a contract with each other wherein when one of them is thrown, the other must match it. Points 2 & 3 are either both straight or both branched.

Points 5 and 6 are contractually dependent as well. When point 5 is branched left, point 6 must also be branched left. When point 5 is straight through or branched right, point 6 must always be straight.

Points 1 and 4 have no immediate dependencies because there is enough track between them and the next point for a train to wait until the all clear signal is given.

For this section of track there are 7 servos required (point 5 uses two), however since 2&3 and 5&6 are dependant, there will be 5 controllers used here.

This morning I completed the layout. I decided against making a three dimensional layout for my first track because I’m more interested in automating it all right now.

The layout has an outside “express” track and three inside tracks which share one line at one end. There are a lot of double turnouts and one triple turnout. The gaps in the track at the ends are because I have a trial version of the software and can’t put more than 50 objects into the plan.

This is version 1.1 of the layout. Version 1.0 used radius 3 track on the inner track at the right hand side and an insulfrog turnout, but I want to use electrofrog on all the points so I had to redesign it. Not sure why there are differences in the track between the two but there are – took me a couple of hours to get it all to fit again.

The track has started going down on the table and tomorrow I hope to make a start on wiring up the bus.

One of the first things I was advised, if I intended to go further with this hobby, was to ditch any Hornby turnouts I had in favour of Peco turnouts.

The Peco ones certainly seem to work better, but they’re different radius to the Hornby ones so it did take a little adjusting.

I bought the Peco Electrofrog points (they have an E in the product code) and I’ll wire them up properly when I get a little further down the track.

I was told (and confirmed myself) that if you buy the track which is in the Hornby Track Kits (A thru F) as individual pieces of Peco track that it works out cheaper! Go figure!

I bought a Hornby East Coast Pullman DCC model train and Hornby Track Pack C set a couple of years ago, put it together in what was then the spare room and played with it for a few weeks watching the trains go around and around a circular track. The train set was very close to one I had when I was a child (a Tri-Ang set that I remember was played with a lot). I don’t know if it was nostalgia that prompted me to purchase it or not.  Anyway, after a few weeks, I then put it away again in its box and did not touch it again. The box got moved around the house a bit, gathering dust, and occasionally I thought about putting it up on eBay, but that never happened.

Skip forward a few years and I had the idea to get the train set out again and set it up. I had some MDF panels that I laid out on the floor, connected up the track and set the trains running. It felt a bit lame, but I found I returned to it every day to look at it and think of the possibilities.

The next task I decided was to set up a table, so I bought myself some pine (19×75) and made a frame and glued and nailed a piece of 9mm A grade ply to the top. The legs I made out of 45×75 pine. The table is what I now know to be pretty standard 4′ x 8′ (1200 x 2400).

I went to my local model train store a couple of days after Christmas and it blew my mind with all the stuff you could get. I bought some track and electrical connectors and headed home to make an interesting (but still simple) layout