Every spare evening is spent in the back room armed with a soldering iron. Thankfully the control panel is now completely finished, apart from two coats of varnish to protect the new paint.
Time to concentrate on the wiring for the track. As there are six individual boards I will need to ensure that all the tracks are electrically connected via the 37 pin connectors.
I also need to wire the points motors and modifiy the existing Dublo wiring under the points to allow for track isolation (Dublo never made isolating electric points sadly)
For the wiring I've opted for six core alarm cable - this stuff is stranded wire rather than the solid cores found in telephone cable. I used phone cable throughout the old layout and found that it didn't like being used in terminal blocks, didn't solder that well and became quite fragile. I'm also conscious of voltage drop through the extensive amount of wiring being used on this layout, alarm cable doesn't tend to suffer too badly in this area, let's face it, it's designed for 12v use and on a standard house alarm system you'll find miles of this stuff in between all the sensors - if it works for that then it'll work for this... that's the logic anyway.
Here I've cut lengths of cable ready to solder to the points...
Once all the points were wired, I labelled them (as some have a different configuration and some don't require isolation) and then soldered individual wires to some straight track sections to allow for all the board joints and the eight isolated sections in the main station...
Another tick off the large to-do list, just the back boards to do now!
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