There's been a little progress since the Adelaide Model Railway Exhibition last month. The layout is now back up and running at home, with my loco storage facility now under construction. This depot is mounted between the front modules and the rear set up tracks (which doubles as a second yard when at home).
The centre of this module being a Walthers 90' Turntable which has been 'Australianised'. Unfortunatley, there have been a few headaches getting the table to perform as well as was expected, which having read several US forums, isn't a suprise - thus why Walthers now release it as a DCC ready "built up" with indexing etc.
The main issue being that the table bridge itself has alot of play when in position, to the point that any loco entering it, will most likely derail as the table can move left to right. I'm thinking about installing some sort of solenoid to secure a locking pin (similar to the prototype) to prevent the bridge moving.
Motor control is temporarily via an ancient "Power Mite" controller (possibly from my first train set some 23 years ago) - its certainly showing its age and its performance is average at best. I intend to replace the controller with a TCS T1 decoder for motor control and a return loop controller to control bridge power.
Given nothings been wired of sceniced yet, all track has been tacked into position so that I can adjust/remove the turnable from its hole in the baseboard while it is tweaked.
Once i've finished this section of the layout, work will then focus on rebuilding Liralau's loco servicing facilites, with a new track arrangement, relaid mainline and passing loop, and a scenery update - as this was the last section of the "original" layout to have been rebuilt - to me this section is now the most embarrasing section of the whole layout, so its certainly time to do something about it. I intend to get this done over the next few months.
