A thousand apologies, but in between starting a new job in October, Christmas and New Years and my beloved game of Cricket (Go the Blackcaps) the limited time I have had available to me has been spent at the beach or actually working on my layout as opposed to writing about it!
Now, I'm not promising any future surge of blog updates, but I will get a few more out over the next couple of weeks catching everyone up on progress.
This first post back is just a quick update really and as you can see from the below post, there has been quite a bit of work done.
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| Completed Trackwork |
All of the track work has been completed! Trains run! Woohoo!
Probably the biggest single achievement to date IMO. One small snag though, I discovered that 75% of my hoarded rolling stock will need to have the wheel-sets replaced with low profile wheels. Luckily I hadn't started converting couplers yet (I will be using knuckle as opposed to the rapido type which most of them have), so by replacing the entire truck assembly I can kill two birds with one stone. Long term project! I have enough that are fine to keep me happy for the moment.
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| Completed Track-work |
I also attempted to DIY some under track decouplers using rare earth magnets as you can see in the bottom picture; while they aren't particularly obvious from the photo, basically the magnets are attached to a washer in opposite polarities. It's pretty hit and miss, and my advice to anyone thinking about doing it is don't bother. before I ballast, I will take them all out. It was a good experiment, but not a keeper.
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| DIY Under-track Decoupler |
You may also notice the control panel on the fascia, which while wired and powered up, is not quite hooked up to the Cobalt Blue switch motors; I will detail that a little more in my next post, though suffice to say, while completely unnecessary, I have decided to install them on all of my turnouts, just because they are cool and because I hate the look of the manual ground throws for N Scale. If you're wondering what the wires poking out of the track-work are, those are the feeds for the turnout frogs that have not yet been connected to the switch machines.
Currently I am working on building the first few structures (i'll show those in another post), and will start ballasting in a couple of weeks.
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