Head of Steel

If I seem a bit excited today, its because a couple of nights ago I finally laid the track in the scenic section of 'Westerooge', making it not only the first model railway I've owned in the last 16 years, but also my first successful attempt at soldering in at least that time. I've decided I like variable temperature soldering irons.

I also moved into uncharted territory by using electrofrog points which have the advantage that they are live everywhere so your locomotives don't stall and embarrass you, but the disadvantage that if you don't wire them up the right way then they short-circuit the whole model and and embarrass you. After drilling a hole through the switch to take the brass rod, I wired it up to the track and turned the power on in the confident expectation of seeing the layout disappear behind a cloud of blue smoke. Remarkably, not only did that not happen, but the blue diesel moved, and in the right direction as well...

Point control and baseboard join: Not pretty, but it works...

So, having conquered this mountain, we can now start adding the ground cover and adding the bits and pieces that will hopefully make this look less like a box file and more like a model railway, and move onto the brave new world of the sector plate fiddle yard.

32 days to go.