Model Railway Forum

Awesome, lovely weathering. You just had to liberate it

The riding school is back open for business. They have had a new dry stone wall built to replace the old wooden fencing.
IMG_1871 by Barry Clayton, on Flickr

Great muddy puddle.

There is still life at Wykeham - just not as much at the moment.
I have just spent an hour under the boards installing a Cobalt Digital point motor - for some reason (old age!), when I replaced all of the Peco solenoid motors with Cobalts, I left one out Anyway, all installed and it works.
Currently all point motors (26) are operated via my Elite controller. I am still waiting for the DCC Concepts etched acrylic top to arrive for my new control panel. It would appear it did arrive back with them, but it wasn't up to their standards to send out to a customer - so it was sent back, which is fair enough.
Probably overkill, but I recently installed a DCC Concepts 5amp power booster to my layout. I was just concerned, although I was advised it is not the norm, that all of my Cobalts take their power directly from the track bus, not a separate one as recommended. I have had no trouble with loco's failing due to sharing the power with the points. So, my layout is operating with just two wires from my Elite connected to the track, which operates all of my loco's and points - so as originally advertised "You can run a DCC layout with only two wires connected to the track".

IMG_1879 by Barry Clayton, on Flickr

Barry it looks like you didn’t have to lay on your back with a soldering iron.

Walkingthedog wrote: ↑Sun Apr 27, 2025 5:01 pm Barry it looks like you didn’t have to lay on your back with a soldering iron.

No I didn't Brian, but I find when dealing with things like this, you find yourself either too close or just that fraction too far away. When dealing with this Cobalt, I found it easier to sit on the floor under the board, and then wear one of those headsets with the magnifying lense that drops down in front of your eyes. I did have too cut the mounting lugs off of one side of the Cobalt, then you have the problem of trying to get the operating rod through the hole in the tie-bar on the point - the Cobalts come with a sticky double-sided pad, which fits between the motor and the board - once you have it all in place, you just have to hope the sticky pad holds the motor long enough for you to get from beneath the board and clamp the rod to stop the motor dropping on to the floor - once clamped you can use the screws supplied to mount the motor underneath the board. All fairly straightforward, but at the time there was a bit of cursing

I have one of those magnifiers Barry. Don’t know what I would do without it and the light on it is very useful.