Model Railway – Page 16 – The Wheeler Model Railway

Station & Goods Yard Complete

The track and wiring for the main station and the goods yard are now all in place, and the point motors have been wired to the driver cards. Mimic panel next…

Initial Main Station Track

The points, and most of the critical track for the main station has now been placed, also the curve joining the station to the goods yard

The points had to be rearranged when I realised I had 5 sets of points to switch, and only 4 drivers for them in that area…

Curve Tracer

Finally figured how to cut the cork sheet to follow the track around a curve…

This worked really well, and I used the resulting paper template to cut the cork.

This is the first draft of the mimic panel layout. The large red circles are the buttons to change the points, the small red circles are red LED’s to indicate point settings, and the yellow LED’s will (eventually) show when a train is present on each section.

The plan is to mount this just under the window.

Conduit Installed

I finally installed a length of conduit under the “narrow” section, to (hopefully) invisibly carry the wires between the sections of layout. Unfortunately, I’d not fully decided how to do this BEFORE making the narrow section, so it was three times the work after…

Craven DMU

This is a Bachman set, with amazing detail. It also has running and interior lights.

Goods Yard

Most of the points and track for the goods yard has now been fitted. This is probably the most complicated bit of track laying, but unfortunately had to be done first…

The track is laid on 1/16″ cork sheet – this hides the holes for the point motors and make the trains run much quieter. Eventually, ballast will be glued on the cork, so little of it will be visible.

Tunnel Curve

The track has been fixed around the main curve – this will be in a tunnel so neatness was less important!

Point Fixing

The first points are now fixed – the holes in the baseboard are for the point “motors”.

A small cork sheet is “sandwiched” between the point and the (pre-wired) motor, then glued to the baseboard. I found it easiest to use a bit of double sided tape to stick the point to the cork sheet first.