Signal Box Levers

 When I was at the Warley show in November I was watching a layout supported by my local model railway/DCC shops - Orwell Model Railways and Coastal DCC. This layout was Long Melford, which was featured in Model Rail magazine recently. The bit that I liked was the bank of levers for the signal box - AKA point and signal control.  These levers were a DCC Concepts product and I vowed to get some for my railway. As Christmas was coming, I persuaded the wife to buy me a box of 6. I had already bought a single one to test out. As I only have seven points this was going to be fine. 

However, it was clear that there were going to have to be 21 wires between the levers and the railway and I couldn't think of how I was going to connect these up because there was nowhere on the layout that I could put the lever frame so it would have to be a stand alone box. I had spoken to Richard from DCC Cncepts at Warley about how to make a mimic board and he told me about their ESP transmitters and receivers. At the time, I thought that he was just suggesting these because of their cost but I realised later that they were a sensible way to go. If I used these, I could build a stand along lever frame that didn't need ANY wires between the frame and the layout.

I decided to find the funds necessary and acquired two ESP sets - one with a transmitter and a receiver and the other one with two transmitters. As each tran emitter handles 3 inputs, this gives me my seven and leaves two more for when I put some signals in. I bought a 12V battery power pack from eBay (rechargeable) and a small crate from my local Hobbycraft and set about making it happen. Here are some photos of the build and the final item.

These are the three transmitters in place.

and in the crate.

You can see the Power Bank. This is rechargeable. I am going to add an LED power-on indicator.

This is the receiver on the layout wired into the DCC bus.

Here is the finished product

The action comes from wires 8 and 9 from each lever - one being the common and the other being one of the poles on the switch. The blue tails are the other 7 wires coming from each lever. I was glad that I left these as it turned out that when the levers were pushed away, the points were thrown and I wanted this to indicate a through switch. Hence, I had to swap wires 7 and 8 which meant cutting back one and extending the other. Amazingly, it all worked first time and I am really happy with it. I am still an Arduino junkie at heart so messing around with stuff like this is what model railways are for me. 

The next steps are as follows:

• fit a 12v indicator LED
• add a 5V power bank with an LED indicator
• see about fitting a double signal at the exit to the station run around
• fit two new levers in the space left on the bank to operate these two signals.

The next major project will be to set the layout mimic panel up with two colour LEDs - red and green - to indicate the way each point it set. These bi-color LEDs will be managed from the 4 - 6 wires on each lever's switches. Regarding my comment about being an Arduino junkie I have the following history.

Back in 1969/1970 I built a Heathkit valve Hifi amplifier. Following that, I build a TATIII (true action throttle) which was one of the first transistorised throttles providing slow acceleration and braking. This was a built from plans in an article in Model Railroader in March 1969. Additionally, I bought the book and eventually made a couple of them. I have some photos of my N scale layout of that time with the throttle in place.  Additionally, I started an Open University degree in 1974 and in 1976 completed  a module on Electronics. Give me a pile of components and a soldering iron and I am like a pig in xxxx.

Here are the only two images that I can find of the TATIII throttle.