Fiddle yard finished

This weekend sees the layout in action for a private two day session. This will be a chance to assemble the fiddle yard and align the tracks properly, while undertaking some other minor repairs & modifications.

All of the electric points and their control circuits are now in position, this presented a fair bit of additional wiring as can be seen below:

With the two end boards done, I then modified the tracks on the centre board. As expected this was reasonably easy as seven of the tracks were left in-situ from the previous design. The points that link the front and rear centre sections have been relocated to the end board, so the trackwork here has been changed to a simple straight and half curve, I drew around the old points before removing them so hopefully this will still line up. 

It's impossible to link the boards together at home but hopefully if I've done my planning properly, most of the tracks will line up and it shouldn't be too big a job to sort the rest.

While I'm working on the front boards, I intend to fit my signal aspect controls, which are now finished. The one here is designed to work two signals which protect one pair of points (one is red, one is green and the aspects swap as the points change)

The circuit is the same as the one designed in the previous post, with a trigger relay operated by the train movement charging the capacitor. The only addition is the 2K ohm variable resistor wired in series with the original resistor, this allows me to adjust the timing. With a 2200uF capacitor the times are between 15 and 30 seconds, with the larger 4700uF capacitor on one of the other boards, the timing can be adjusted between approx 20 and 60 seconds. This one will be fitted on the outer loop where I tend to run the goods train, which takes a while to fully clear the signal.

More pictures and videos to follow.