Extension: FINISHED!

Last week, we worked on the upper loop section, adding dowel pins & catches before laying the track.

This then needed to be wired to the rest of the upper section.

With this done, the layout could be assembled in its full 21 foot glory for the very first time.

 With just four days to go before its first outing in the new extended format, we put the layout together for final testing!

The main tracks were tested with a recently acquired green Deltic (not pictured) and then the Lima Railcar was sent along the newly extended shuttle track for the very first time.

There were a few unexpected gremlins along the way - having stripped the control panel to add the new switches and graphics, some wiring had to be amended, also one of the points controllers in the original boards suddenly failed. I also managed to blow up the Arduino controlling the turntable after accidentally sending 12 volts through the switch sensor in the process of fault diagnosis. Thankfully I mounted these in socket pins so it'll be a simple job to replace.

The hope was to make the extension look like it was always part of the layout design. I'll leave it to others to decide if we've succeeded in that! 

Looking from the main station end, looks pretty seamless to me!

The Railcar will never actually get to live in the engine shed, but whilst it was out testing the shuttle, we used it to test the new sidings, and thankfully they all work.

So that's it, job done and ready (just) for a four day exhibition.

Just one final thing to do...

This poor old maroon coach was used throughout the build to test the track joins and features in many of the build progress pictures. It's fair to say that it's had a hard life, so as work is now complete, time to refurbish it so that it can be used on the layout which it spent so much time testing!

Much better!