Under the revised wiring of the layout to fit the plug sockets in the Leyland garage all the power units are on a shelf so that I can see what is happening. The wires from these until then all enter  the Lower Board 1.

There are four parts to the power units.

This power pack contains transformers fed from the mains and providing the three outputs shows - 16vAC, 12vDC and 5vDC.  The 12vDC can also be used to power the Doll’s House lighting but I have bought a separate power pack for that, just not go around to using it.

Having soldered several hundred wires to D connectors for a previous layout I now used connector blocks (chocolate blocks as they used to be known). This board lists the wires, feeds and standard colours used on the layout.

The ECB circuit breaker is incredibly useful if you have a layout where crashes and derailments are common. The drawback in Chorley was that this was hidden under the board, now it is on display. With three circuits (now really two) it is possible to work out roughly where problems are. I installed a separate switch on each board to isolate the track power to that board. The trouble is remembering which is which and that whilst six switches are in the main operating well, four of them are in the smaller well, and are tricky to reach without causing problems. Last year I therefore decided to change the circuit so that the power for the DCC track feeds goes to a new rotary switch by Lower Panel. This can be turned to switch all the track feeds off, which works well, though sadly it has be used a lot.

The rotary switch can also be turned to send the DCC power only to a jack socket into which I can plug one of three jack plugs for loco cleaning, test running, or a DCC programming track completely separate form the layout.

The main NCE Power Pro station is on the far right. It also has some pretty lights. The grey cable on the right goes to the power in section on Board 1L.

The far right connector is the telephone type cable for the DCC instructions (not the track power which is the black and white leads on the bottom left).

The DCC cable goes through various other connectors to NCE UTP units into which the hand held controllers can be plugged. In theory that means I can have 8 controllers plugged in. However I also have a WiFiTrax WD-31 which allows me to create a wifi network from which I can use an iPad or iPhone. So far I have only bothered with an old iPad as it can show 2 locos at once. Another light, which shows on the front of one of the UTP units..

There have been three control panels since early on. I had planned to replace these by now but ran out of time.  I want to install more LEDs and have bought them, but cutting the holes for them is hard work. However, the new plan is to get a 3D printer to use for all sorts of things but mostly to do with the railway and including the panels.

The temporary panel mentioned above can be seen to the left, it has eight occupations LEDs. A further four have been added, but a further extension has not been done so they are stuck to a piece of plasticard.  The older occupation LEDs are round red, the new, blue rectangular. I regret not having signal indicators on the panel because many of the signal lights can’t be seen from the operating well.

Some changes have been made to location of two signal with hand written labels.

Finally for this page I have both Digitrax BCDN and about six or eight NCE BD4 occupancy detectors. They work in different ways and at present the latter go to the round red LEDs not eh panels and the former to the blue rectangular. I find both work very well but the BCDNs were difficult to work out how to get the working and mostly by a lot of trial and error. The instructions said there were ribbon cables provide but it seems that in the UK this is not the case. The arrangement of the pins for those connects seem to me to be illogical, but I got there in the end.

That is it for the present. It is now two and a half weeks before my grandchildren visit. I would like to say that I have corrected all the problems but whilst there are no points where trains just fall off now there are fairly regular problems with uncoupling. Also, in common with real railways heat can be an issue. In retrospect I would have been better having a white garage door rather than a white one. The main issues arise from not paying attention to where trains are and whether points have been properly set. When there are issues finding them and correcting for them remains an issue. This seems to be true of most model railways but the fact that so much of my track is hidden and hard to get to makes me wonder whether at some point I might need to rethink the layout.