Running In

 With everything working electrically, it is now time to test out some of the plans that I have for the railway. Initially, I wanted to try out the passenger side as I had bought some quite old Hornby "blood and custard" coaches to run with the Accurascale Manor 4-6-0.

Ok so first off, there was a problem with the Hornby coaches. They had what the hobby calls "pizza cutter" wheels and wouldn't go through the points so I had to buy a pack of Bachmann replacement wheel pairs. These fixed that problem. Then, I was having difficulty uncoupling the first coach from the loco as the coaches had the old type of coupler - the whole width of the coach - and my hand uncoupler was causing derailments. The answer to this was to replace the couplers with Kadees.

Brett at the LHS sold me some NEM Kadees and some little NEM sockets that were supplied by Golden Valley. These seemed like a good idea in that you just glue them to the floor of the coach and plug an NEM coupler in. However, they interfered with the bogies and were too high to couple properly to the Manor. The Manor had NEM sockets so it was easy to remove the existing couplers and replace them with Kadees so that was the benchmark height.

The floor of the coaches was very high so I had to pad out the base to get the couplers to the right height. I used the Golden Valley adapter on one coach but it needed cutting about and padding out so it was a bit of a faff so I dug out some Kadee no. 5s for the other two coaches. Here is how it looks - not nice but it all works. First the Golden Valley NEM set up.

Now, the No. 5s much neater.

Once I had the couplers sorted, it was time to run some trains. I have three passenger trains planned for the routine. One will be a 64XX with an auto coach. Then there will be a 64XX with two local passenger coaches. Lastly, there will be the weekly holiday train which will be the Manor 78XX with three Mk 1 coaches - 2 brakes and one full coach. The theory is that these three coaches came off a London to Cornwall train (led by a Castle presumably) and were brought down from the main line by the Manor. Here is what it looks like with two of these in.

I did, however, uncover two problems that interfered with the successful running of the trains. First off, there was an issue with the Manor transitioning from the main baseboard onto the fiddle yard board. It seems that there is a rise in the track at the edge of the board that is causing the Manor to slip its wheels.  Also, the long Mk.1 coaches don't much like the join either. I need to do some work on the join between the two boards to get rid of this. Secondly, the Digitrax controller isn't acting normally when there is a short. Normally, if I run a point the wrong way round, there is a short which clears itself when the loco is moved to clear the point. This is not happening and I am having to turn the Digitrax box off, wait 5 or so seconds, and turn the box back on. 

(Aside: needless to say, the point of the levers is that I can see how each point is set so that shorts shouldn't happen - as in a real signal box - but I still do it!)

I put a question up on Model Railroad Hobbyist where the answer seemed to be a fault in the Digitrax controller. However, I thought about this and I think it has more to do with the way that I have wired in the ESP radio receiver for the point levers. I just put the ESP board in between the controller and the power bus which makes it susceptible to the short. I think that I have to put in a separate accessory bus so that the short doesn't get to the ESP board. In any case, I am checking this ideas out with DCC Concepts so we shall see what we see. Here is the current and proposed layouts.

There will be more on this, I can promise.

Ballasting and a backscene

 I told myself that I wouldn't put ballast down on this railway as I have always made a mess of the process before ending up with points that were stuck. However, I found myself carrying out the task the other day. I took it nice and slowly making sure that I avoided the switching part of each point. In fact, I actually enjoyed the process, which took about 5 days - so you can see how slowly I took it.

Having got all the ballast down, I repainted the rest of the boards in the Hobbycraft brown.

As you can tell, I have also added a backscene to the boards.  This is one of my foamcore processes. 

As you can see in this image, I cut a piece of foamcore and create tabs sticking downwards. Once, the whole lot is complete, I hold each panel up against the back of the main baseboard and create some slots for the tabs to slide into. This way, I can remove the backscene when I need to turn the main board over to work on the underside.

Now, we come to the downside. I bought a backscene from my LHS - Model Scenery Supplies Backscene 206B - which comes as a roll of 3m long and 380mm high. I cut off some of the height. Now we come to the problem (which you can see on the shot of the whole board above). I can't use the normal method of glueing the paper to the board as PVA has lots of water as a component and this would make the foamcore  warp - I have been there before. Hence, I use strips of double sided tape - four lines along the length. The problem is that it is very sticky so you get one go at it. As you can see, that one go one the first board along the back resulted in some bumps that couldn't be ironed out. I ended up cutting along the bump and re-sticking it down. It looks dreadful. 

This taught me a lesson so, when I did the next board, I glued about 4" down at a time. This seemed to work quite well and, hence, the last two boards were a success. I have ordered a replacement roll from Orwell's, which should be here on Friday. I have changed the order, under Brett's instruction, to their premium brand, which comes as vinyl rather than paper and is pre-glued. We shall see how we get on. Fortunately, because the backscene is in four pieces, I can replace the bad bits easily.

I have also bought some 1" Velcro self adhesive front and back. Once I have got the backscene sorted, I will place a 6" length of Velcro across each joint at the top. I will then cut that at the join leaving 3" on each side. Using the other component of the roll, I will cut out a 6" length of that and use it to fix the  two boards tightly together.

Lastly, I tried the track out with some of my locos. First off, the track needed a lot of cleaning - high grade emery loaded with Track Magic eventually got most of the muck left over from ballasting off the top of the rails. Three issues emerged. 

1. One piece of track had lost its connection to the track bus so I had to make a temporary connection using crocodile clips.
2. My latest loco - a 94XX from Bachmann - was misbehaving. It is fitted with a Next18 decoder from Accurascale - the one that came with my Manor. It jerks three times on starting and stopping which makes it difficult to use. I will take it to Orwells tomorrow to get Kevin to have a look at it. I expect that I will ask him to put a Zimo decoder in as a replacement.
3. The DCC Concepts levers stopped working. I messed about taking the power off and on, etc. but nothing fixed it so finally I took the lid off the lever box and saw that all the pilot lights were out. The battery had run down! It didn't show externally, as there was enough power to keep the LED on the panel working but not enough for the boards.

All three issues will be resolved easily. 1 and 3 are already sorted and 2 will be fixed tomorrow.