My Kingdom for a Z scale Re 6/6 - part 5

All 'looking' good, but now, how to actually get a speeding Rokuhan loco to run with a slower Marklin one...

I read on the magic interweb that you can take about .7 volts out of a wire using a diode, so 4 were soldered up in pairs and this did indeed slow the loco down a tad - enough that they run fairly comfortably together.

Experimenting:

As installed:

Then after some track cleaning, run-testing commenced. The first issue was the clearances between raised pantographs vs tunnel portals - this was quickly resolved.

As feared, the next problem was some uncoupling from the Re 6/6 on tight curves due to the long overhang of its body-mounted couplers. This was mitigated somewhat by clipping the wee 'uncoupling' nub from the underside of the coupler - on the sharpest curves this was hitting the outer rail and upsetting things.

But uncoupling remains somewhat of a problem, primarily vs the Marklin Re 4/4, as that loco is running slower and gets pushed in places, with its bogie-mounted coupler following the track line and the 6/6's sticking way out beyond the curve.

As an experiment, I put the 6/6 in front and because the 6/6 is a tad faster, the pair runs very well together with no uncoupling issues detected. Arguably the loco combination looks better too (from a distance!), as the 6/6 is a little taller than it should be. But of course this isn't what had been planned... is the 6/6 a good enough model to lead? I suppose it could be made to look a little better with more filling, painting and detailing of the nose, plus the installation of a pilot to replace the front coupler.

The other issue that has to be dealt with somehow is that my 'raised' pantos need to be lowered further to clear the fairly tight spiral in the south hill above the Wassen church just beyond where the above video stops...!

In Control

Time to tame the electrical demons.

The back of a control panel. Starting to drill some holes for block isolation switches:

These are DPDT center-off switches which will route power to a block (for example, the "Up Main"). The theory is that with the switch in the up position, power will be routed to the track from the "UP" controller, if down, from the "DOWN" controllers, and, as the name suggests, no connections are made when the switch is in the center position.

If I wasn't so impatient I would have something clever done with that front panel but can't wait now...

The input power buses starting to be connected with copper telephone wire:

Input plug from the two controllers connected to the busses behind:

Connected to the track sections tag board:

And tacked into place on the layout:

A few more wires to attach ...

Organising a Rat's Nest - wiring tagboards

As someone who has been using DCC since 1995, it seems strange to be 'stepping back in time' to a DC powered layout.

As Wassen is a whimsical distraction that I've already spent more than enough money on, adding a bunch of Z decoders and fluffing about with all of that isn't likely to happen at this stage, if at all. Especially as this seems to be a pretty simple layout with just an 'Up' track and a 'Down' track and some storage sidings.

However to make that work involves electrically isolating the track into sections and powering only the ones that you want to actually run trains on at a particular point in time.

By my count (and I did run out of fingers at one stage), there will be 9 or 10 sections on the layout: two mainline tracks, 5 sidings or isolatable sections in the yard at the bottom, and two or three up top.

As you "saw" earlier (if you'll pardon the pun), I used a Dremel cut off wheel to cut gaps in the rails. (If I'd had some plastic insulating rail joiners I might have used those, but they don't always hold the track in perfect alignment.)

Until now, I have soldered the minimum number of wires onto tracks and hung them all together in a temporary fashion to be able to run a train around for testing purposes. Obviously that's only a partial short-term solution that had to be tackled at some stage.

Today I decided to make this all a bit more kosher, wiring up all (ok, 'all but one') of the sidings:

...feeding all the wires properly through the baseboard (easy in foamboard!),

...and attaching them all to a tagboard so its a bit easier to understand and debug as required:

I've put the tagboard into a spot to the right-rear of the layout that is reasonably accessible, labeled it with a marker that you probably can't see here, and used different coloured wires where possible to make troubleshooting and adjustments easier.

An appointment with the soldering iron

Its a necessary evil, soldering.

I detest the welding of wires and would far prefer to be diving into the scenery, but without a few well-placed cables stuck to the rails, the trains don't move far.

My z-scaled paranoia has only made things more difficult by insisting on lots of feeders, jumpers and sections of 'continuously welded rail'.

So far I've got most of the existing track fed with wires, and by temporarily joining the correct ones together, was able to run a train down from the highest section of 'down' mainline, down through the various spirals and levels into the yard, around the bend and back uphill to the highest section of 'uphill' mainline.

As you can see its all splendid apart from those two points. The one at the left has had no issues until today but now the frog and point blades seems to have died. The one at right only played up for this video, but I hope its not a harbinger of bad things to come.

This is a bit of a bugger. They'll be hidden from the outside world, but I don't want to have to be nudging things along like this...

The are both Micro Trains monsters. I can't find any issues on the web but that might be because most Z scale modelers do so from the safety of their armchairs.

I have two options here.

1. Try to power the frog somehow (presumably via a slide switch/pushrod activator
2. Replace the problematic with a spare

If I do the latter, there is a weird internal spinney arrangement underneath that I might have a look at on the dead one to see if I can figure out how these work. I don't know why point makers don't just install a more reliable power-routing mechanism in the point throwing mechanism that powers the frog. Has anybody figured this out in any scale??

Yardstick

With the layout back in one piece, its probably as good a time as any to tackle the yard.

After a bit of fiddling and experimentation, I'm going to end up with storage for at least 4-6 trains down there, depending on how you count things, plus between 1-3 up top. Plus one each way on the mains if things get really hectic.

Also, every track is well over the length of my 'test train' of 12 hoppers and two locos, with three of the storage tracks being about 50% longer - far more than the current loco fleet can haul.  Not bad for a layout of less square area than a door!

The schematic for the downstairs yard looks something like this:

As can be seen, two of the sidings are single-ended - so trains will back in or out.

Now for some baby steps... As I'm using straight DC power at this stage, I'll need to electrically isolate the sidings and only have them energised when I want them active - or else all 10 trains will move at once. I don't have any isolating rail joiners, but luckily a passing Jokertrekker let me borrow his Dremel and a cut-off wheel. My old 110 volt one having been donated to a model railway club when I left the US.

Cuts were made across rails mid-section thus (the plastic 'ballast' keeps everything together):

And then track was soldered at the rail joiners into sections:

And then everything started to come into place quite quickly:

She's lookin' good, Vern.

Hopefully workable at least, and probably with a little room for expansion. I'm a little short of track at the moment - as the intended clandestine meetup with my dealer of such items didn't work out a few weeks ago - so I'll be one loop short for a while.

In the meantime I have the track nearest the edge to connect up and some soldering of power feeds and the like to keep me busy.

Wire Welding

If there’s one thing that heads the bottom of my list of modelling capabilities, it’s sticking two bits of metal together with solder. I’ve always been pretty bad at this skill, no matter how much I read and practice, I just don’t seem to be able to put the theory into action in a consistent and tidy way.

However, tonight I cast aside any fears and sprung reluctantly into action with the welding iron as I need to get some track feeders in place before building can continue. Up til now I’ve built most of the middle and upper levels as removable pieces as it would be too hard getting an iron into track hiding underneath higher levels later on.

My electrical intention, as mentioned earlier, is to weld tracks into strings about a metre long, and then have a feeder connecting each string to a main power bus. The feeders, in addition to the fishplates between strings should provide a reliable power conduit but the gaps between strings will allow for some rail expansion and contraction as the seasons change. I’m not going DCC on this layout (well not at this stage anyway) so things are complicated by having to marshall the electricity into blocks, and further by having a twisting layout where the inside track becomes the outside track and back again in a short distance, confusing my head as which colour wire to attach to which rail.

As for on-off-switchable blocks, I figure I’ll have one for the uphill track, one for the down, one for each storage track (the Micro Trains switches don’t provide any form of electrical isolation), and perhaps one for the big arrival track on the lower level. Each track will have a three position switch so it can be fed from either of two controllers or be isolated when trains are being stabled. 

If trains run at the same speed up and down one might be able to get away with having one transformer set on 50% of power and merely sit there flipping block switches and points to make the trains stop and start...

Don’t look now, I told you this would be ugly. The big red/black bus wire is for the uphill tracks a bus wire for the downhill track is yet to be purchased! All joins have some visible access from either within the hidden sections or from under the layout.

One of the more exciting innovations, derived several ciders into this session, is the DB-patent-pending Bunny Hopper™ - one feed provided between two strings that powers both. Next time I’ll do this in a cider-less state... 

Experiments in Trackage

The first thing I need to do to see if my squiggly plan is even remotely feasible in practice is to see what sort of train a pair of tiny, light Marklin Z scale Re 4/4s can pull up a grade.

The Importance of Grades

At 'Wassen in the real world’, the three track levels are quite some distance apart vertically, and if I cannot gain a visual representation of that, my model is going to look flat and silly. On such a short layout, every vertical mm helps the effect, so whether my models will go up a 1:50 or 1:30 will make a big difference in the visual spacing between my three track levels. 

There is another key thing that the ruling gradient impacts given my space constraints - they define what radius is needed to make a loop-de-loop. If trains will only run up a shallow grade, one needs a longer track run (bigger radius), to gain the required vertical clearance to pass over over a loco (with pantograph extended) on the lower track, which means spirals take up more space on my small layout. Conversely, a steeper working grade means you can use a smaller radius which takes up less space. 

To figure all this out, I need a powered test grade and see what happens. Thus, I need some track.

Flex vs sectional

Which leads me to a completely different issue. In a Z layout with plenty of hidden trackage, the last thing I need is derailments and stop-start operation. I had a brainwave early on to go with sectional track (remember that?!) for perfectly smooth tight circles for the hidden stuff and use flex for the sweeping visible sections.  I already had some Microtrains flex and points and picked up some extra Peco flex, but decided to go with a newish player in Z called Rokuhan for the spirals, as their track has a good reputation for reliability and they have an excellent variety of curve radii, not all of which are toy-train-pizza-layout tight. I picked the track up from Frank, the Z Scale Hobo.

Electricity

Remembering back several decades to bad experiences as a kid with beaten-up old sectional track, I worry about how reliable all those rail joiners will be over time in Z - there’s nothing less fun to operate than a layout with poor electrics and stuttering trains. 

I guess there are two options here. One is to have power feeds to every piece of sectional track (as I struggle to solder wires to rails three times the size of Z scale ones, the thought of attempting this worries me), or else solder strings of the sectional tracks together at the fishplates and apply one feeder to the completed string. The latter approach seemed more feasible to me, but my first attempts to solder sections together were a struggle to get enough heat without melting the plastic track base. So I tried soldering feeders to the wee brass nubs on the underside of a piece of sectional track: even less successful. 

Soldering

Finally I seem to have my thermit welding process sorted. 

1. Apply flux around the rail joiner on the 'outside-side' of the track
2. Press hard with the solder from the outside of the rail to counteract the force of pressing hard on the inside of the rail with the soldering iron
3. All going well, if there is good contact between the iron and the rail, things heat up, followed by a little sizzling, followed with solder flowing into the joint after a few seconds. if not, reapply heat with the tip at a slightly different angle
4. File down any leftover solder on the tops of the rails

Whew. I’ve been soldering things together into strings of usually 4 curved sections (180 degrees of curve) and will apply a power feeder to each. Between strings, I'll use normal (i.e. unsoldered) fishplates to allow for the expansion and contraction of the rails that comes with the seasons. Having said all of this, the fishplates on the Rokuhan track seem very good, but I’m playing it safe with the solder and feeds as backup…

Public Service Announcement

Polyester socks are less effective than steel capped boots when you drop your soldering iron.