Wiring

  • Wiring

    Powering Up the track for DCC

    I’ve decided to do a pretty simple DCC wiring construction without bothering with circuit breakers, a separate accessory bus or booster circuits. If my layout was larger or more complex, that might be something I’d have to consider. The down side is that a short will cut the supply to everything. Since I went simple, effectively all a needed to do is ensure all the rails are suitably live using a series of ‘dropper’ wires connected onto 2 larger DC supply wires. I used brown and blue to differentiate the polarity. The image below shows how I connected the droppers going up through the baseboard to the main power using…

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  • Trackwork,  Wiring

    It’s Alive

    So I thought I’d better test that trains can actually run on this layout before I got too far down the track (sorry). I rigged up a cheap transformer based on an eBay PWM. Then I added an a old power pack I had lying around from an old wireless phone set (I think). My test train is from a Hornby LMS Suburban Passenger Train Pack. It’s consists of a Fowler 4P engine and 3 Stanier coaches. Since I’m going to run DCC eventually, I need to have insulators to stop shorting out around the points. That meant I had to temporarily bridge for this test to work. After some…

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