Return to Swallow's End

After a hiatus of many weeks (months actually) I decided it was about time I did something more on my embryonic 2mm layout.

At last visit, I had made a start on the dirt, and had put down all the track bar the points, having also ballasted the track which was put down.  I am still not convinced, having put soil around the place, that ballasting first, rather than my usual last, is a good idea.  There is more cleaning up to do on the edges than I usually have to do - my logic for ballast last is that is what happens in the real world although, to be fair, in the real world the track comes after the landscape!

I hadn't put the points down because I hadn't sorted out how I am going to change them - the TOU.  I still haven't although I have a couple of ideas which is why I thought I should do something.  The first something I had to do, was make sure all the points were "gapped" correctly.  This involves making sure the frog is electrically separate from the side running rails - which are also having to be separate from each other.

Being a little concerned about the issue of short circuits, I thought about if for a while and decided the simplest thing would be to wire a light bulb into a circuit with the points.  The photo below probably explains it better than I can with words:





Simply power from a 12v source to the light, then to the RH rail.  The other rail connected to the other terminal on the power source.  If the light is on, then the point isn't gapped.  Find all the bits I missed (which turns out to be more than I thought or hoped) and clean up the various over solders and missing gaps - usually where I hadn't cut all the copper away cleanly - until the light goes out.  Move one wire to the frog and see if it goes on with a feed to either outside rail.  If not, then success.

Tonight I have, in between watching TV, checked two of the 6.  At this rate, I will have them all done by the weekend, at which point I will trial fit them on the layout and make sure the frog rails aren't touching anything they shouldn't.  Then the TOU saga begins in earnest!