The baseboard and track are painted

 Finally, the baseboard is all wired up and sockets fitted for plugging in the ECoS and the 5V DC supply. The staging track has been built and can now be attached to the main board.

First off, the track has been sprayed with "Ammo by MIG" Railway Fast Method paint set. I can't see me using all the colours but the rust worked very well.

I then painted their whole of the baseboard and the staging with some Hobbycraft brown acrylic paint. This has given everything a nice overall colour ready for ballasting.

The staging is attached using a couple of 50mm x10mm magnets. One is set into the staging board and one on the main board. They are strong enough to keep the staging in place but not too strong to affect removal. They also snap into place quite well but I also have a couple of rail joiners to make the final connection.

The site from the staging track connects though a small barrel plug and socket but it isn't really required because the rail joiners make an electrical connection as well.

Lastly, I have built a box to hold all of my current locos and cars. This is made out of the black foam core so is very sturdy. 

Each car has its own compartment. The scruffy bits of foam are made up from an offcut that I bought at the local "foam" shop. These stop the cars from rattling around when I pick up the tray or move it.

There is a photo of each car in the bottom of each compartment so that they can go back where they came from.

Finale

Well that is the current state of play. The track has been cleaned and tested and all of it works as expected. The two locos run  freely and both have sound so they are great fun. I am busy writing some Car Card software. I have decided not to use the software that I wrote for my degree as that was way too complicated for my little switching layout so I am writing some code that mimics the Micromark car cards. I will have more on that once it is capable of operating at its full design capability.

Wiring is all in place

 Having put in a DCC bus and a 5V bus, I now needed to connect up all of the track before I start putting the point motors in. The idea was that I would use some clever suitcase connectors that I got from Amazon that have a socket for a plug that lets a new connection to the bus. However, the suitcases needed squeezing shut and the plugs needed a compression on the wire. Both needed a good set of pliers, which I don't have so I muddled through with a pair of adjustable pliers. 

I carried on and connected all of the track droppers BUT - they didn't work! It seems that I couldn't cramp them tight enough. A combination of the wrong tool and arthritic hands. So, it was a case of going back to the old methods. I have a large collection of some connectors similar to Waco except that they are grey with orange levers (you can see the pass through ones in the image above). I have these as a 2 wire pass through or single channel 3 up to 5 way connectors.  They are a bit messier than the suitcase ones but, at least, I know that they work. After connecting all the track using these, I checked it out to find that a) I had missed a couple of places and b) in two places the wires were reversed! How can you get "black to the back" wrong?

Once I had sorted that out, it was time to go for the point motors. 

Fitting the motors

I have had trouble in the past getting the motors securely fastened to the foam core. Basically, the covering of the foam core is just a sheet of paper either side of the foam interior so there isn't a lot of shear strength in it. I cut out some 2mm plastic card to the footprint of the motor and used UHU glue to attach these at each point location. I had previously drilled pilot holes in the card to match the screw locations on the point motors. Once the glue was fully hardened I located each point through the holes in the board that I had made when laying the points. The screws held the points nice and securely so that all worked.

Now, I have never used the Cobalt Analog motors so I made a bit of a mistake in wiring them up. I assumed that the track voltage feed was all that was necessary along with the frog so I wired the track to 1 and 2 with the frog on 3. Wrong! The track goes to  1 and 2. Then you wire the track to 4 and 5 with the frog in 6. If the loco causes a short when passing over the frog, you reverse 4 and 5.  That sorted I had a railway that was wired.

I bought a couple of Frog Juicers as I was having trouble getting some of the points sorted but eventually the juicers weren't required. 

Adding the Accessory decoders

I use ESU SwitchPilot decoders to run any points that aren't DCC aware. These have to be adapted to operate Cobalt Analog motors as these motors, like Kato points, only require 2 wires and are switched when the plus and negative are reversed. So, we have to add some natty little DCC Concepts gizmos that take the three wire output of the SwitchPilot and convert it to a two wire feed.

As there are 6 points - well 7 actually but two are in a crossover so have the same DCC address - I needed two SwitchPilots. One of these worked and the other didn't. I spent over a day trying to sort this out. I asked questions on the ESU forum and, typically, got no answers. I tried two different SwitchPilots and even replaced them with s TrainTech device and nothing worked.

Finally, I applied a bit of logic and compared the two to see that 1) The lights were on one and not the other and 2) the switch that determines the protocol was on User and not K84. I always thought that User was the right setting but I switched it to the other and all the lights came on.

Finale

Everything worked except one frog feed needed reversing. I have a running layout. Next step is to build a tray to hold all of the cars and locos so that I can put trains together easily on the staging track.