Tramps N Gauge

Well nearly 2years since I last looked at the layout and the mojo just came flooding back!

I pulled out the layout from the garage wall ripped the resistors out of the wiring looms for the buildings and order a dc-dc voltage convertor,

One thing that bothered me (when I lost the urge) Was that I was going to have to redo all my wiring looms, after some testing I found that I was putting too much current through them and basically cooking the resistor. I Considered leaveing them as they were but after running them for a length of time the resistor turned out to be quite a fire risk! I knew it was going to be a painful job changing the looms as they were so damn fiddly to solder and I knew I didn’t have much spare cable tail left.

So the loom work was my first job only one building loom couldn’t be saved (the winch house) so now it has a replacement single led in, instead of the awesome 4led loom it used to have - oh well.




So today, me and my son played trains for a bit, we then drilled a few holes for the cables to run from the buildings down to under the base so the buildings can be illuminated,



Then I looked at the winding house, ideally when it’s all finished I want the colliery head gear wheels to turn, one forward one backward, the cabling runs to the winding house where (in a real colliery) the motor lives, in this I was going to struggle to fit the motor in without obscuring the led, so I decided I just wanted the cable to loop in and out of the building. Because of where the cable runs in and out it was going to be difficult to mount a pulley so I opted to have a guide for the rope. I decided to use a bit of automotive copper brake pipe, I flared both ends that way I could ensure it was lined up with the rope guides cast onto the side of the building

Here was guide before I fitted it


The guide fitted (I just used a hot glue gun to glue it in position)


And with the cable ran through it,


The motor that will turn this cable will be under the base board

I’ve also been thinking about my controller, I have a single dc controller that came with a graham farish set, the problem I have is that when I run my class 20 and any of my other locos (with the single controller powering both loops) the class 20 is much more responsive, to set the ‘other’ loco to a suitable speed the class20 is rocketing around, & if I set the speed right on the class20 the other loco doesn’t run. To overcome this I think I need two controllers, I was toying with the idea of making the display battery powered using a 12v battery and radio controlled car speed controllers (PWM controllers) If it was battery powered I wouldn’t have to mess about with trailing cables then every time we wanted to play trains & I’ve already got most of the parts,

Thanks for reading
Luke