BenWeiner

Can't resist adding this (same photostream) as a counterpoint. We have scans of similar photos (possibly from the same visit) taken by a club member. I'll have to check the dates again.

Plenty of diesels amongst the PLA photos on Flickr: there are more where this came from.

Along with all the other excitement during our outing to Ally Pally, your photographer did manage to capture some genuine fly shunting (non-coupled stock movement) taking place.

We got into Ally Pally this afternoon and have started putting the layout together.

Definitely a day to celebrate for the Orchard Wharf team. Allowing for many months when we were unable to work as we expected, this has taken a long time. It is now much clearer how long it takes to put together a system on this scale that uses an integrated control system. I hope the experience gained can be put to good use in future projects. Too early to say this is finished work, but the next few months will give us the opportunity to test everything out and I think we are going to find we've created something that works well and fully meets our original ambitions. Come and see us at Ally Pally next month where we expect to be up and running! Ben

That's a very good question! The convention is that to put text into a forum post you type it in directly -- and I suspect because it is technically quite complex to support it well, the very rational alternative option of dragging a text file into the box and having the system take the text out of it for you is done only rarely (for example in Google Docs). Thanks John! Ben

We had a good work session on Saturday - the time draws near when trains will run (though whether they'll complete their journeys remains to be discovered). Things still look a bit disordered; we're working underneath the boards, which we can conveniently stand on their sides, so this is a typical view: And here's some very advanced and theoretical paperwork. In this case, to work out the frog polarisation of a diamond crossing and turnout that span a board joint and thus represented a bit of a challenge during the session. Looking at it now, I think it makes just as much sense whichever way around it's turned and probably more so with the pad face down: See us at Ally Pally! We're on show as a layout under construction at London Festival of Railway Modelling this year, 16-17 March. Come and see us and find out how we're getting along! No absolute guarantee that there will be running trains, but if you are an MRC member and you want to help us run trains at the show, please contact Ben or John - orchardwharf@themrc.org.uk

Quick check shows a set of quint-arts do fit on the traverser, including the loco. These ones could do with a bit more above solebar level though. Must get that moving.

We couldn't resist a second session this weekend. Today James and I took stock of our CBus progress, as a prelude to answering my question: 'what would it take to allow us to use the control system to move the turnouts when we are fettling the high level track?' We were able to spend about three hours tracking down unfinished connections here and there with both the two centre boards connected and powered. A point of concern is that we have at least two servos that never happily settle in place. These make quite a lot of noise as they fails to settle and seem to cause the controlling CANMIO board's power regulator to get hot. So that will be our starting point next time. Meanwhile John has been reworking the storage box for the Pepper Warehouse model, a large building that conceals part of the fiddle yard at the London end of the layout. Here is a photo of the partially complete model (in its first iteration) sitting in the box. A new Pepper Warehouse will be made because this one, a pioneer for us in lasercutting, was made from greyboard and, without having the benefit of a box, it's suffered quite a few knocks. It'll be better the second time! Note, this is the back of the model. The real structure stood at the eastern end of the East India Docks close to Bow Creek (the mouth of the River Lea). John added a second floor to the building, so that its roof could hide the high level fiddleyard traverser.

Today's session was fairly brief. A review showed that the servocross modules elsewhere on the layout had almost all been done, so we looked into providing power to the high level traverser on board 1. This is directly above another traverser serving the low level. There is limited headroom and wires on the underside would be problematic. We came up with a solution. More on this when we have something to show! As all four main boards are set up I connected together some of the inter-board cables for the very first time. Left to right: DCC main bus, accessory and control power buses, CBus (the smaller connectors).

In fact, it seems that we can meet on Saturday. Have a look here: https://www.themodelrailwayclub.org/events/

@jamespetts many thanks for the supplies! Yesterday I tackled the short on board 2 high level DCC. This occupied roughly five hours! It was due to three places where copperclad sleepers were not isolated. In a couple of cases you would never have known there was a connection -- but there was! After that I connected up all the servocross modules on board 2 high level - about 1.5 hours, which given there are four allows us to estimate how long it will take to do the rest. Again a day with no visible progress but plenty of effort expended. I'm looking forward to having a larger team in the coming weeks so we can move a bit more quickly towards what I see as our next goal: running trains across the high level.

Lots of interesting rolling stock info...

Oops, missed this Port of London Authority (PLA) thread on RM Web. I'd better follow it now. https://www.rmweb.co.uk/forums/topic/167570-port-of-london-authority-pla-brake-van-liveries/ Naturally enough the content is broader than the thread title suggests. Some very good photographs in there too!

I am referring to the intermediate wiring between the bus (the output side of the DCO) and the droppers. As those are connected in using tag strip, it seems easiest to remove each from its tags until we lose the short circuit. Bad luck if it is the last one, but it should be ten minutes' work to find any and all culprits. Ben

Last Saturday was a solo working day. I continued on the bus wiring; in this session I was able to finish up the high level on board 2. I was also able to learn that somewhere it has a short. To trace this means unsoldering each of the feeders until the one or ones that are short circuiting are identified. Then all the track that's connected to each of the shorting feeders must be checked over and the source of the short discovered. A job for next time. We won't be able to work this coming weekend due to the mini-exhibition, which reminds me to say: Visit the mini exhibition! 10 December, 11:00 to 16:00 at Keen House. I've also put together a DCC wiring progress tracker; here is the position on 2 December 2023: Board High level feeders Low level feeders Traverser feeders Through bus Post-DCO bus Frogs F0 n/a Not assessed n/a Not assessed n/a No 1 n/a Yes No Yes n/a No 2 Yes Yes n/a Yes n/a No 3 Yes Yes n/a Partial n/a No 4 n/a Yes No Yes No No 5 No n/a n/a n/a No No All boxes do not represent the same amount of work, but a rule of thumb is one box is one person-day! Will we make it in time for the Ally Pally show? Ben

Yesterday was another DCC day with three of us hard at work. It was a long day too with the last of us leaving after 8pm. Several more of the DCC board buses are now very close to complete. We don't have a lot to show for all this yet apart from a depleted stock of wire and heat shrink, but the time will come when it all pays off. We had a brief visit from one of the people meeting elsewhere in Keen House, and from him we learned of the pick up goods services that operated from Willesden yard on the London Midland region across to Poplar Dock (originally Midland owned). We intend to take inspiration from this working for our schedule, redirecting it along our imaginary route to North Woolwich, and have been thinking about the motive power. Our visitor recalled that a class 24 diesel was used when he travelled on it during his training in the early 1960s. We would welcome more information for the period of the layout: early 1950s to late 1960s.

Last Saturday was a DCC day. I connected up the low level power district on board 2. It's about 8 hours' work to do this, and that excludes fitting the track droppers. If others are interested there are still several power districts to do! I used the new work stands to make life easier.

Yesterday was spent wiring up the traverser control panel, connecting track power droppers and extending DCC buses. Also, after a number of years of working on the electrics it came to me that it would be easy to make supports so that a layout board can be turned upside-down, allowing the underside to be worked on conveniently. So I made some. They are bolted to the board ends with the same fixings that usually bolt each board to its neighbour. The whole thing can also be angled at about 45°, using the long side of the board. That won't be possible once there is scenery in place. The supports made the work I was doing a lot easier. Shame it took so long to figure that out.

Last Saturday was another big wiring day, with progress on DCC droppers and buses and more work on the finer points of board four, including its integrated control panel for the regulation of trains on and off the high level London end traverser. There was also some track fettling, which is what happens when people start looking at the track wistfully and imagining it with trains moving along it.

Just for change, here's one of our MERG DCC District Cutouts (DCOs), with a companion. There's one of these for each high and low level section on each board, and we have another one for the extension that adds a train reservoir at one end of the layout. Grand total 9 pieces. This one is now fully wired in which includes the unswitched DCC supply, the switched DCC output to the track, feedback and control connections to MIO CBUS cards and a buzzer that provides additional alert. The DCOs limit the effect of a short circuit caused by a vehicle running onto the frog of a reversed turnout and so connecting the polarities. By breaking up the layout into zones in this way, the only area that will actually experience the short (and where all movement will cease) is the one where it happens (say, low level on board three). Trains running elsewhere will not be affected and will keep running. One of yesterday's tasks was to connect up the feedback and control connections for the three DCOs on board four. We also discovered that all the rest of the feedback wiring remains to be installed on that board, so it's good that there are only three uncouplers and one turnout.

Part 2 The experience of Paul's talk was a bit special. It was great to learn how much care he, and by implication colleagues at Accurascale and other model railway manufacturers, put into their work. It was also really interesting to get insights into the necessary tradeoffs between complete fidelity to the prototype and the practicalities of manufacturing something that is robust and also a convincing reproduction. In conversation afterwards Paul explained that he and colleagues at Accurascale are kit-building modellers themselves, and when working out the difficult details and marginal parts their knowledge of building and detailing plastic kits can be channelled into the design. On his engineering sample in unpainted pale grey plastic and bare metal the details stood out razor sharp and some of the plastic seemed daringly fine, but he'd already told us about running these models around on a track on the carpet and handling them to see what would actually stand up to real world usage. When I mentoned Orchard Wharf, Paul pointed out the rebate in the underside of the running board to allow for a bit of side play in the 00 front wheelset. P4 he felt was not going to fit, but there might just be room for EM. It was great to think that this possibility had been considered by the product manager! Of course for the remaining 98% of customers it'll never be of interest. All in all an entertaining and enjoyable talk and a shot in the arm for our project. It's great to have someone from the trade come and invest some of their time out of hours to tell us about what they do and why. Especially if they are working on a model of such a nice locomotive.

Tonight's Model Railway Club talk by Paul Isles from Accurascale was naturally of much interest. At LFoRM in March the company announced they would be producing an 00 scale model of a Great Eastern tank loco usually known by its nickname, 'buckjumper', or its LNER designations J67, J68 and J69. This would fit perfectly into Orchard Wharf's stocklist. Paul talked about what it's like to take a model loco development project through from viability studies to 'engineering sample', which is basically the stage that this model has reached. He brought the first engineering sample along, which gave a chance to take a look at the underside and speculate about converting it to EM.

This weekend we focused on mic building and electrics. But the eye-catching work was a first draft of the brewery building adjoining the pepper warehouse admin block. Photos below

This weekend's work session allowed us to add in the inter-board connections from board 1 to board F0, which is an extension at the front of the layout and so connects in a slightly different way. We also fitted a couple more of the DCC power district cut-outs (DCOs for short) and made progress hooking up the DCC bus to the track droppers. 'Next time' I think I will want to figure out the electronics time budget before even considering a layout proposal on its possible operational or scenic interest -- but the wiring marathon will hopefully soon be over.