Fareham Railex

Having left home at an obscene time of the morning, we arrived early on Saturday morning to commence setting up for another weekend exhibition. This time we were making our first appearance at Fareham Railex.

Although the setup went reasonably well, the gremlins crept in, and came thick & fast too!

One of the problems with working on sections of the layout individually is that there is no opportunity to fully test the entire layout. The first fault of the day was no lights working in boards two & three, so a makeshift connection was made between boards one and two to rectify this.

We then discovered a number of dead siding tracks at the back, a number of points not operating and then no TPO working. This turned out to be a problem within the control panel - while adding the additional wire for the new turntable control, another had become dislodged, which wiped out the power supply to more than half of the switches within the panel. Thankfully a test meter is always carried, along with a circuit diagram and schematic. This makes fault finding easier but still tricky when all six boards are clamped together!

The newly installed turntable, having worked initially, then refused to play ball. It turned out that some ballast from the sidings had got caught within the mechanism, jamming the whole thing. After a quick strip-down and some lubrication, the turntable eventually settled into reliable operation - a huge relief, although at times it developed a mind of its own and started turning at random. I suspect that there's some electrical interference so an independent power supply may be required in future.

So Saturday morning was a bit of a nightmare but once all the gremlins were ironed out, we settled into reliable running. No breakdowns this time so nothing to fix. The turntable was undoubtedly the star of the show.

The new configuration is a lot tidier than it was previously:

Finally we're able to use all of the tracks off the turntable. The far right hand points aren't yet wired-in, so this was left as a static siding, which we parked the breakdown crane in!

Very few photos this time but lots of video footage, especially of the turntable. We also managed a triple headed rake of 0-6-2 tanks, for no other reason than we could!

Video to follow, once it's been compiled!