Getting ready to show "Burrowby Underhill".

[gtmspyder]

I was just been browsing the various forums, as you do when you've nowt better to do, :lol: and I was looking at the exhibition calendar on the 009 website and got a real shock.



  Some where in the back of my mind I thought that the imminent East Midlands Groups exhibition was jangling warning bells.  I normally visit this exhibition because it is reasonably near where I live, and Roger Budd the co-organiser, visits our 009 Yorkshire group meetings near Doncaster occasionally, usually looking for willing modellers prepared to travel to Mansfield with there layout, my last visit was to exhibit Knottworthy, although of course this is an 0/16.5, 7mm narrow gauge layout.



  Any way, I must have promised Roger that I would bring my 009 Rabbit layout to the show, now as some of you might know, I have been engrossed in the Knottworthy alterations since its visit to the Pudsey show with a friend from the 009 group who came along to help me on the day, he jokingly pointed out several disparities in the running of the Knottworthy layout, ie. it had very little operator interest really, hence my acceptance of his criticism prompting the ongoing alterations now underway to the Knottworthy layout.



  Some years back, I once promised Roger that I would take a layout to the Mansfield show, this would have been with Glen Ogle. I had to cry off because of one of my many visits to hospital for something or other, and I while convalescing, I subsequently gave the layout away, thinking I would never be in a position to venture onto the exhibition circuit in the near future, so no one ever did see it in the flesh so to speak.  When I read that Brian Twigg was going to show his UNAMED 009 layout in the pre show blurb on the 009 events page, I was in a real panic.



  The layout has languished in my garage for the last four or five years as I worked on Glen Ogle and then Knottworthy, and as such, has suffered from building damage, which I knew about, but I thought I had only to connect the electrics back up so it ran, then sort out the building's and scenery to be able to take it to Mansfield's Portland College.

The layout in its present state, most of the scenery buildings have suffered damage, these have been removed for some TLC except thankfully, not the two station buildings.



The Rabbit layout was built to please my at the time, very young Grandson, and over a period of time, had many additions to the simple concept of a train bobbing in and out of tunnels as it perambulated around.

I added many little electrical gimmicks to keep him amused, as you do, if you can, so powering it back up, especially as I have not operated it for a considerable period of time, I suppose was never going to be as simple as I thought.

So I ambled into my garage to do the electrical work in powering it up, and oh boy, did I get a shock:

The rear view of the layout showing some of the controls fixed to the back scene.



Unlike my present work, the rabbit layout is all analogue controlled, with electric points, a working wind mill. working lock gates on the canal, automatic train stop and start from a hidden siding, as one came off scene it released a stored one to replace it, there is also a double auto train stop start timer from off scene into the station, which when activated, changed the points from the two hidden sidings onto the main circuit and then off the main circuit and into the station bay platform, plus several automatic colour light signals scattered about. 

A view of the whole of the rear of the layout.

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The control panel is a pull out slide drawer on the front of the layout with lots of LED's, outlining the track diagram, point switches, section switches and gismo control switches, all connected with multicore cables to allow the drawer to slide in and out of its hidey hole.

The control panel of the layout which slides into a drawer out of the way.

[URL=http://s1010.photobucket.com/user/gtmspyder/media/DSCF4531_zpsgwkvqkra.jpg.html]

The electric for all this was fed to the base board via an eight way Din plug and socket, from a home made power source with triple transformers, rectifiers and CDU capacitors, for the various voltages,  AC or DC as required at various voltages.



This power source has been altered, probably for Glen Ogle in its early build days, when that too was going to be analogue, and is no longer exactly as required for the rabbit layout, and I am puzzled why I used an eight way DIN plug, as potentially, only six wires would have been required from the triple power source enclosure.

So I have to check the wiring to find out what does what, and as usual, most of the wiring is under the base board except for the relays, timing module and some other bits which are accessible as they are mounted on the layouts back scene board, the base board is only 4' x 2' (1220 x 600mm) so is not particularly heavy, I had a quick peak underneath to see what's what, shuddered and lowered it quickly back onto its trestle stand.

This was why I shuddered, the underside of the base board.







There is a lot of work involved in wire tracing and power supply modifications required before the first train is able to run on the layout, and that is without all the scenery repairs to do.   WHOOPEE, I've got four weeks to the show, so any help would be appreciated.

Onward and upwards as they say.

Regards

BrianT.

[gtmspyder]

I have decided to call the unnamed rabbit layout "Burrowby Underhill", so any future postings will be under the new name ;D.

Regards,

BrianT.

[B.Meldon]

The rear view of the layout showing some of the controls fixed to the back scene.



Regards

BrianT.

I recommend that you sort out that rail joint on the curve.
If you have used flexi-track it is best to pre-bend the rail, but it may be too late for that now.
If it is set-track replace that section with a new one.

If you have a nice solid wood track bed you could screw in a brass screw and solder the rail to that to stop it springing out of place.

Brian Meldon

[gtmspyder]

Thank you Brian, as soon as there is any likelihood of getting anything running anytime soon, ::) I will attend to it.

Just part of the joys of bringing an old misused layout back to life.

Kind regards,

BrianT.

[gtmspyder]

Just an update on my efforts to resurrect what is now called "Burrowby Underhill", a 10 or so year old 009 Rabbit layout that is destined for the East Midlands show at the Portland College, Mansfield in early July 2019 if I am able to get it working again.

This has lain dormant in my garage for the past 7 years when my now 13 year old Grandson lost interest in it and I moved onto building the 009 "Glen Ogle layout".

I have shown pictures of the layout in the earlier post, and a description of the model with the recent pictures I have displayed in the post, and I'm afraid I am having difficulties coming to terms with my memory, lack of mobility and dexterity.

Over the last few days I have spent MANY hours working on the layout, with limited success.

I rebuilt the power box back to its former design which gives me three outputs of 13.5V AC for the controller feed, a 20.5V DC for the point motor power, and a variable 2 to 20V  AC/DC output depending whether I connect a rectifier for whatever else I might wish to have a supply to, the output cable was changed from an 8 pin DIN plug to a 6 way DIN on 6 core cable, why I had fitted an 8 way DIN plug onto the 6 way cable I've no idea.

I have changed the 8 way DIN socket input to the layout back to a 6 way DIN socket, identified the wiring to the hand held controller which has a 4 way DIN socket  mounted on the base board to match the 4 way DIN  plug wired to  the hand held controller I will be using.

I have located the track feeds around the layout, a relatively easy job as these were red and black from a ring main around the base board with regular feeds off to the track as track feeds, and managed to get a loco moving around the track, with difficulty as the track was filthy, and there were two in tunnel sections I could not get to where the loco repeatedly stalled and had to be rescued with a patent Ne-odium magnet on a stick, which picked up the loco chassis I was using as a test vehicle and retrieved from the depths of the two tunnels it kept stalling in.

There was also one point just inside one of the other tunnels where it was easy to get my hand in where the test loco would leave the track for some unknown reason, this was easily retrieved without the magnet, but whatever was troubling the loco, I knew would be difficult to sort out because of the restricted access.

I had identified the point feeds, and directed the 20V wiring to them, but the power was insufficient to move several points together, so I had fitted a Capacitor Discharge Unit to give more oomph, and this was no longer working, time constraints were against me building another one, so a quick scan of Ebay located a suitable replacement which I have ordered, and should have been here today Friday 07/06/19, but it has not yet arrived, so I could not test the points, so the test train can only traverse the circuit that the points were left in when last used several years ago.

So thwarted with that bit of revival work, I thought I would cut access holes to allow me to clean the in tunnel track, and a smaller access hole at he side of the sometimes loco chucking off point so that I could tweak whatever was causing the problem, so this little job got under way.  A big oblong was marked out on the backscene panel adjacent to the two dirty track sections, and a smaller access hole was marked out at the side of the errant point.  To cut the panels out, I drilled a hole at each corner of the two oblongs, to accept my Jigsaw's blade and proceeded to cut the out, the first larger cut-out was made without a hitch, but the second smaller cut-out was a more difficult cut because it was between two decks of the rising trackwork little more the 3 inches, enough I thought to be able to tweak whatever was occasionally troubling the loco as it crossed the point.  So holes drilled and Jigsaw blade inserted and the cut was under way, then there was a nasty bump from the Jigsaw, the reciprocating blade had hit the side of the point I was trying to gain access too, and more or less, completely destroyed it.

This meant that what was to be a relatively minor tweak to an errant point, had now become a wholesale removal and replacement job.  Now as I'm sure some of you will have had to replace an already fixed point at some time, you will know the difficulties in extracting the point from between the three fixed lengths of track. and replacing it with another point.  This was also exacerbated by the fact that between decks the space was only 3 inches, the two out put tracks from the errant point were on a tight rising curved area of baseboard, and I had used set track as it was out of sight of viewers, and because of all the unnecessary, in hindsight electrics, had two reed switches imbedded between the two curved sections of track rails, a section switch cuts slicing through one rail and switched feed wires soldered to the live feed rails, meaning that as well as the usual pin fixings that held the rails in place, there were six through baseboard wires going back to the control panel. The just out of tunnel mouth toe end of the point rail also had section cuts and a reed switch as it curved into the lower station, this time on flexi track, adding 3 more through the base board wires.

To lift the track sufficient to be able to part the joints sufficiently for the damaged point to be replaced, meant that all these nine wires had to be cut, I had left a little slack in the wires below the base board, but not really  enough to allow the track to be moved sufficiently to part the rail sections, so snip snip with the side cutters, and at last, the joints could be parted and the new point put into place.

There were several other obstacles that arose during this upheaval that I had to overcome, but I've gone on long enough to warn anyone contemplating replacing an in situ point, to look at the likely pitfalls.

So the track work was reinstated, I decided to abandon the reed switch wire reconnections as these only lit up an LED indicating where a loco was passing, the dead sections were now through tracks until I cut the rails sections again, the dirty track had been cleaned in the two tunnels, there were sufficient feeds else where to feed the track, so I had not yet reinstated the other track feeds I had cut, so I now could try a test train around the complete layout apart from the unpowered points, zilch, no movement from the test loco, and the controller overload was clicking in and out, indicating I had a dead short some where in the circuit.  Clearly, I needed to cut the rails again to reinstate the sections.

To be continued later, its 9 am, today 08/06/19, and I am about to travel to Burton on Trent to the 7mm Narrow gauge annual exhibition,  so I will save this now and resume sometime later

Regards,

BrianT

[Tom Haythornthwaite]

Wow - please keep us updated.  Good luck!

[gtmspyder]

Good morning each, we are now on Monday 10/06/19, and I spent most of yesterday, ripping out ALL of the original wiring from Barrowby, pictures later.

I have had to admit I have been defeated by my own technology, I just couldn't remember what all the wiring did to be able to modify it, I was spending too much time trying to trace the wires, so snip snip time wholesale, and I am now re-wiring, but in a very basic way, no LED's, No wind mill , no waterwheel, no timed shuttle train into the bay platform, and as yet, no delivery of the new CDU to be able to operate the dammed points.

So, just an ability to circulate trains and switch the points, hope fully.

Regards and dejected in defeat,

BrianT.

[Julian Coulson]

I find this an interesting thread as I'm about to embark on a layout combining standard and narrow gauge on the same board and it's good to get an idea about the narrow gauge side of it. What is the minimum radius curve in narrow gauge that can be achieved as so far I've only thought about an end to end scenario?

[Hugh Norwood]

..moved..

[B.Meldon]

Toby, perhaps it would be better to start a new thread rather than add on to this one?

Brian Meldon

[gtmspyder]

Hello Toby, thank you for your interest in my posts, but right at this moment in time, I really am not the person to be able to answer your question.

If you have followed the thread to this point, you will have seen that I am in a great deal of difficulty trying to full fill a promise to a  show organiser to exhibit a layout that has not run for at least eight years, maybe more, and I am having many obstacles put in my way by some sort of jinx, aided by my mobility to move around the layout, and my memory loss.

For instance, one of the problems was that the points would not operate, the capacitor discharge unit appears to have packed up, and because of time constraints, I ordered a new one off EBAY.  It arrived last Saturday the 8th, three days after it was supposed to, and I was out at postal delivery time.  Now normally our postman, if he cannot get an item through my letterbox, will hide it somewhere and leave me a note, but, Sods law, the regular postie was not on, and his replacement pushed the none delivery note through my post box, but bent it and it did not come right through, and I did not spot it until Monday, 10th.  But instead of being the usual red one, this one was white, and told me that it could not be delivered as the wrong postal charge had been applied, and I owed them

[Julian Coulson]

Toby, perhaps it would be better to start a new thread rather than add on to this one?

Brian Meldon

Cheers. Done that

[gtmspyder]

As you will have read in previous posts, I am having difficulties trying to resurrect an old unnamed Rabbit layout, which I have now called "Burrowby Underhill".

This has resulted in me ripping out the plethora of wiring that originally successfully made it work, so to visually re-cap, here are some pictures of the layout and its attendant wiring, before my frustrated attack with my side cutters, and after.

A view of the layout, as brought out of my garage, where it had been used as a shelf for the past eleven years, with several of the partially damaged buildings removed in readiness of some TLC.  The working windmill, the working water wheel mill, the working lock gates, and the working colour light signals.  The track plan on a pull out drawer had all the point toggle switches with there large chrome industrial master push button firing switch,  each point had  a red/green LED showing the direction of travel, and the rest of the LED's showed sections which could be switched on or off with red/green LED's, and the travel of the train was indicated on the plan by green LED's operated by in track reed switches as the train perambulated around the track.  Out of site was a long stretch of track that ran along the rear length of the layout, divided into three isolated sections to hold three separate trains, as one train came out, the other two followed up into the released, sections making room for a circulating train to pull into the newly released section to the rear. This was indicated on the track diagram by three push to make switches and three red/green diodes.



A closer look at the pull out control panel.



The single spur in the centre of the control panel, eventually became a double spur out of site under the scenery to hold two further trains off scene.   This was controlled by an electronic timing unit that selected a train, set the point for it and brought it out, changing a point to bring it onto the main circulating line for a short way ,and changing another point to direct it into a bay platform at the lower station, this is not being shown on the track diagram as it was probably the last of many additions I made to the layout to amuse my Grandson. While all this was going on a further train would be circulating the layout completely unaffected, would pass through the lower station, and when it had cleared the section, a timer would kick in and reverse the whole procedure to park this loco off scene, and reset the track for the circulating loco for when it returns.

The timer and relay that did all the above jiggery-pokery, picture below.



The three train storage track running along the rear lower deck of the layout.



The underside of the layout showing the original wiring, before its wholesale removal as I was getting nowhere fast.



And this is the wiring after the snip snip exercise.



The new wiring replacing the original the green and white sleeving carries the new point wiring of green, yellow and blue common, the red wires are the new wiring to connect the control panel section switches to the track sections.



The new CDU that I purchased to replace the old original one, the new unit does not work when I connected it into the wiring.



The inside  of the underside of the track diagram before the snip snip moment.



The underside of the track diagram after the wholesale clear out of surplus wiring.



There have been several setbacks during this attempt to resurrect the layout, and I have really struggled, but the final straw for me, was the purchase of a new CDU, that when connected, does not work the points, and I have given up the struggle and called it a day with Burrowby Underhill.

I will be at the east Midlands show at the Portland College, Mansfield, thanks to the kind offer from a fellow 009 member, Mr John Andrews, who has offered me the loan of one of his layouts, and who I hope will accompany me to Mansfield to receive due credit for what is a very nice little layout, which will give pleasure to the viewers, and enable me to honour my commitment to Roger Bugg, by filling the gap allocated to Burrowby Underhill on the day.

Kind regards to all the people who have offered support and encouragement over the last few days, but enough is enough.

BrianT.

[Tom Haythornthwaite]

Oh, I did not see this coming.  Hard luck.

What are the lessons learned from the overall challenge?  Improved wire labeling?

[B.Meldon]

Oh, I did not see this coming.  Hard luck.

What are the lessons learned from the overall challenge?  Improved wire labeling?

Or 'keep it simple' perhaps??

Brian Meldon