Getting ready to show "Burrowby Underhill".

[gtmspyder]

It's nice to see that even after all my trials and tribulations members are still following my angst.

Yes Tom, better labelling might have helped, but it would have had to be very comprehensive, and even then, really the only solution to this number of eventual wires would be a proper professional type circuit diagram, which I was well able to produce at the time this layout was conceived, but we are talking about an at the time simple layout for a three year old Grandson, the woodwork to produce the layout being far more complex, than the original electrics.

Keeping it simple Brian was the concept of the original idea, the three year old had simply to turn the control knob, a train would set off, and almost immediately disappear, where's it gone Granpa, and the squeals of delight as it appears from a totally different direction and so on.  A press of a button, quickly learned, and lo and behold, a second train would appear.

But children quickly learn, and my three year old was definitely no slouch, as he has gone on to prove over his advancing school years, and so more and more gadgets and train movements were required to hold his attention and continue to delight.

This layout was a toy, one of many I have made him over the years, it was never intended to be other than a short term solution to filling his playtime hours when he visited us, this it did before being discarded and relegated to the depth of my garage, while I concentrated on at fist Glen Ogle and now the radio controlled Knottworthy Magna in 0/16.5,  7mm narrow gauge.

Hindsight is a wonderful attribute, but the lack of that, as well as memory and mobility loss, is where I am today.

Kind regards, I will be at Mansfield on the 13th of July, but not with Burrowby Underhill, a kind member of the 009 Yorkshire Group has offered me a layout to take to the show, and permit me to honour the promise I made.

BrianT.

[gtmspyder]

As some of you who read the other forum may know, a very kind member of my 009 members group, the South Yorkshire group, Mr John Andrews, offered me the loan of an old 009 layout of his, when I failed to get Burrowby Underwood back upto scratch in time to fulfil a Promise to Roger Bugg of the east Midlands 009 group, to take a layout down to Portland College in Mansfield, for the annual East Midlands narrow gauge show on the 13th of July, 2019.

John calls this little layout a decorated test track, but when he demonstrated it to me, I was very pleased to find that it is a very nicely done test track, that only required a quick wash and brush up, to be up and running, so I gratefully accepted his kind offer and brought it home with me, and for the last few days, I have been beavering away getting it into an exhibtionable state.

The layout has now been ballasted, the points have the switch blades of the dead frog points now polarity wired back to seven DPC over slide switches, grouped and mounted on a plate of Opel Perspex, with the operating slide dollies drilled to accept a piano wire operating rod, running in Nylon tubing, when the supplier gets his/her finger out and finally delivers the tubing. >:(


The Gaugemaster controller feed wires have been altered slightly to accept a double pole Mono plug and socket for ease of setting up.


The holes to accept the Nylon tubing have been drilled ready for the tubing runs, to take them below the baseboard.   This was done using a 300  x 4mm home made drill to be able to drill through the existing baseboard and scenery at a very slight angle to keep the tubing as flat as possible between switch and point tie bar, only time will tell whether I have been successful in this work.


The scenery has been refreshed with new scatter materials.


Several of my analogue 009 loco's and rolling stock have been test run around the layout, and the local population has had an increase in numbers.


All I have to do now is await the arrival of the Nylon tubing, fit it and hope that the test operation of the switch/point changeover dollies operate the points as intended, no pressure there then? :laugh:


Regards,


BrianT.

[gtmspyder]

Well the Nylon tubing arrived today, just as I was leaving to visit our local hospital for my prostate check, so I couldn't try it out with my piano wire I'd had for years, I've no idea why I nought it in the now very dim and dark past.



I had bought the Nylon tubing from Ebay, from a pneumatic supplier, a lot cheaper than the Mercontrol supplier for point operation.



Having seen the Urology consultant, I was not particularly bothered about getting back to railway modelling, it was not good news.



Any way, I have now got back into the swing of things. the 1/8th Nylon tubing was ok for the purpose. and I'm now busy trying to fit the tubing and piano wire in place to operate the points, and it is not as easy as running a few wires and point motors!!!



Relatively easy on a dead straight run between switch and point, but on a finished layout, and with a centralised point operating position, as you would or could with electrics, not so easy at all.



Anyone who uses this method to switch points on their layouts, will have by now realised that I have never used wire and tubing unti now, but I am getting there, sslllooowwwwlllly. ::)



Regards.



BrianT

[gtmspyder]

It's been a while since I updated you, so here are a few pictures of the current state of the loan layout from John Andrews, that is going to the Portland College, Mansfield,  for the east Midland 009 Narrow Gauge exhibition.


The layout is a simple roundy roundy, with a passing loops to the front and rear, an engine shed road off to the front left, and a goods storage road off to the right.


So, simple to operate, with ample room to hold at least three made up trains.


John gave me permission to do more or less what I liked with it, as he had built it more as a test track than a layout.

The scenery he had installed was a little tired, and the track had never been ballasted, the dead frog points were all digitally operated, ie you pushed them with whichever digit was nearest to the tie bar.


This worked perfectly well when John dragged it down from his loft to demonstrate it to me, and he was happy to let me bring it home with me.


The little layout after I had freshened up the scenery and ballasted it.






The black base patches are where John's scenic buildings sit, which are still packed away in my garage just as John
packed them for me to take away.






My wife bless her, was not so happy, as my garage now housed three railways, and sundry quite large wooden toys I had made my grandson ,over his thirteen years of existence.


One bright red half size all electric Land Rover, a 20 note Barrel Organ built in a stage proscenium arch setting, a Ukulele, three  Violins and a Viola for my children when they were in the Rotherham Youth Orchestra during their later school years, and sundry small wooden models of various things.


The three layouts were my 7mm 0.16.5  narrow gauge Knottworthy Magna layout, the 009 Burrowby Underhill, rabbit layout I had made for my three or four year old grandson at the time, and which gave me so much trouble trying to resurrect it after seven or eight years lying unused in my garage, and John's 009 continental swimming pool spa, who's name I have already forgotten.


In mitigation, I have just been diagnosed with Prostate Cancer, and Thursday, the 27th of June was our 60th Wedding Anniversary, so she was treating me gently, and I think I've got away without too much aggro.


My postings have shown the problems I have had with the Burrowby layout, mainly due to my ever poorer memory, and my complicated wiring, so with a new layout to play with from John, I set about doing a little refurbishment.


The scenery and ballasting were soon done, and I wondered what else I could do to make the layout less vulnerable to glitches and fingerpokening.


I was wary of the dead frog points, which relied on the side contact of the switch blades to make electrical contact, so I wired the crossings similar to live frog points.


This required each point to have a selector switch to alter the polarity of the point crossing, and so I thought I would use wire in tube to move the point blades and switch the crossing polarity, a method that I hade never used before.


Because  I am used to wiring things up, I made a bank of seven DPCO slide switches into a control panel mounted centrally at the rear of the layout, I had to make a 300mm x 4mm drill to be able to drill for the Nylon tubing below the existing scenery and baseboard at an angle, it all seemed simple enough at the time.


When I fitted the Nylon tubing and enclosed piano wire in place, bent the ends of the piano wire and attached it to each tie bar and appropriate labelled switch, and found out that really, this was not the way to use wire in tube operation.


I had clipped all the tubes in nice gentle loops where I could not get a straight run using Burglar alarm wiring staples, from my time of helping friends, by installing burglar alarms for them. and it all looked very neat and shipshape.  All the switch wiring was run to the frog positions using multicore alarm cable back to the DPCO switches, BUT, it did not work.
Not because the tube & wire was too stiff due to the bends, but because there was insufficient movement in the slide switch dollies, to take up the slack in the operating tubes.


The underside of the layout showing all the wire in tube runs, and the frog to switch cabling.  The switch panel is over the central baseboard support, all the cables and the wire tubes are clipped to the baseboard with Burglar Alarm cable staples.






Some of the point blades were moving, but not all, and I could think of no way to remove the inbuilt slack in the curved push/pull operating links.


So I removed all the curved sections and just used the straight push pull sections, cut my switch mounting up, to just leave the four straight operators, but even then, the inbuilt slack made the operation unreliable, so all this was removed, and I decided to return to the digital operation of the seven point switch blades.


The mark 1 wire in tube switch block I made , cut from a seven switch operator down to a four block when I tried going back to a straight push pull operator wire configuration. And when that did not work, the MK3 switch mounting block with the DPCO slide switches changed to DPCO toggle switches, geographically placed on a track diagram.





But when I tried the layout running with fingerpoken point operation, the loco's were stopping mid point in some cases, I then realised that because I had altered the frog operation, the frogs needed to have a switched feed for the polarity.


This entailed making a second switch mounting frame, with a track diagram and the DPCO toggle switches mounted in the appropriate position on the track diagram, so I rewired the points with six core alarm cable, with the intention of putting point motors in place, but by this time, my enthusiasm was on the wain, I was constantly tired because of the new medication I had been prescribed, my limbs seemed not to want to cooperate, and I have given up on the point motors.


The under side of the layout with the latest wiring installed, with intention of fitting point motors at each point position, the seven 6 core cables will carry all the wiring from the switch panel position  to each point motor, when all was finished, the points would be fed by a capacitor discharge supply using a single firing button when all the point switches had been set for the route.

The single cables dangling are wires from the earlier wiring to the frog live side, all the blacks are wired as common return. The older live side wiring will be replaced by one of the cores in all the new 6 core cable runs back to the new switches, and fed from the live side feed wire from the controller. The six core cable ends have just been left dangling until the new point motors were fitted, then they would have been connected to the appropriate point on the seep point motors and finally clipped to the baseboard.   You will be able to see the grooves cut into the baseboard where the first wire in tube runs terminated at the point tie bar positions.




So the point operation will be fingerpoken, I will finish wiring the frogs to the switch positions with the already run cabling probably tomorrow, and hope that all will be well.at the next testing session.
We will just have to remember after the fingerpoken movement  of the point switch blades, to switch the toggle switch to the correct position to change the polarity of the frog as appropriate.


Kind Regards from a very tired and chaste modeller,


BriantT