An Evening of Catch Up

Lots of little jobs were completed.

* The Point motor holes enlarged as the tracks moved a bit.
* The Fiddle Yard track is tacked to the board.
* The building line is measured and discussed.

The point motors were wired using the Stratton St.George wiring colour scheme. (If anyone explains it to me I’ll post it later.)

One interesting point to note is that the auxiliary connectors on the Guagemaster Seep point motors are being used to power the frog. Past experience has shown this to be a useful activity as a backup for those small Peco contacts and is best done while access is still easy.

Full Steam Ahead and a Picnic

Nothing much to add this week other than we are still pushing on.

Wire drops are put through the board in the fiddle yard and soldered to the rails. In time these will be cut and joined again via a connector under the baseboard. This will allow for easy separation of the baseboards for travel to and from exhibitions.

Front of house the track is joined up and insulating fish plates put on all of the frogs. It is our intention is to run this section as a whole, so jumpers will be used to bypass the insulation. The thinking behind this is that if we change our minds next week (that’s never happened before) we can easily create sections.

As on the fiddle yard side we use the brass screw and solder trick to stabilise the rails as they cross the baseboard join. We’ll cut sometime later.

Then before gluing the track down we make some simple track gauges using scrap wood this helps hold the spacing. A few squirts of PVA under the track, avoiding any moving bits and the addition of some heavy weights and were done for now.

5…4…3…2…1..”Cutting”

Work is now progressing on both sides of the board so things are really happening. This increased work ethic continues for at least ten minutes until a discussion on ring-tones and hamsters brings things to a grinding halt.



On the scenic side it’s track laying continues and the first cuts are made using a shiny pair of Xuron track cutters. These cutters are superb and slice the track with ease, unfortunately some shrapnel hits another member of the team and emergency first aid is administered (once everyone stops laughing!)

In the tradesman’s area the finishing touches made to the extended fiddle yard. The edges are planed a little flatter after our efforts of last week and some black paint is splashed about to finish the look.

Remember those brass screws we put in a couple of weeks back? To complete the board join we next soldered the rail to the screws. This ensures a mechanically sound joint when we cut the rail and separate the baseboards later. The trick is to only solder on the outside of the rail, avoiding derailment city.

Finishing off the evening with a spot of recycling the old Fyffes warehouse is sliced into a low relief building. That’s one less thing to do….

Poor Workmanship and Cabbage don’t mix!

The realisation that this model is expected at an exhibition in September has helped focus the minds a little. We wind up the pace and crack on working on two fronts; track laying and back scene construction.

Track laying is going well, the observant may notice that the points now leaving the existing dock scene have changed again. The “Y” point is giving much improved curve further down the line.


Once the track was cut and joined we even remembered to mark and drill the holes for the point motors, moving the track out the way first!

Whilst all this was going on some fine woodwork was taking place to create the basis for the back scene. The jaunty angles provided some interesting challenges to the bodgers with the jig saw, but eventually we had something worthy of screwing in place.


A squirt of filler and a slap of paint and no one will ever notice the gaps...

Fiddle Yard Frenzy

One of the goals of the expansion board was to extend the length of the fiddle yard, just to get that last inch of coaches in!

In order to achieve this first the existing tracks in the fiddle yard were tidied up and cut back. We had previously used some bits of rough track with broken sleepers and untidy ends.

New track was then laid in position and cut to length.

As this track runs over a baseboard join small brass flat head screws were put either side of the join below the track level. Sleepers were then removed from the track to avoid any fouling and the screws raised to meet the track base.



The track will be soldered to the screws prior to cutting. This provides a very stable and reliable join.