The Exhibition Looms

Nearly-complete Panel

The wiring has been a treat, exercising my grey cells somewhat. I am glad to have tried using a wiring list, however. This has made me think things through, such as colour coding. Mind you, if I'd paid more attention to the last column - length - I might not have run out of red quite so soon! Just visible is the start of the lacing that keeps 10 (soon to be 12) point and signal motor cables from tying themselves into complex knots while I'm working on them.

The original control panel was a Gaugemaster PCU2, switch 6 of which had been replaced by a DPDT switch. This latter seems only to have flipped the feed and return from one end of the passing loop to the other in the original wiring. This made it possible to pass trains without isolating sections, but it meant that the up facing point at the Lynton end could only be operated in tandem with the down facing point at the Barnstaple end. In reality, these points were operated separately and not even interlocked. I'm probably going to avoid wiring isolation switches back at the panel by linking the isolation sections to the operation of the starting signals.

Anyhow, in the absence of a ready-to-hand replacement for the PCU2, I've gone all Peco. This is the first time I've installed passing contact switches (though that's what the PCU2 consists of unless hacked about), and it took visits to two local model shops to get them together. The yellow one is not some nod to prototype practice, but merely what happens when shops can only keep limited stock. I'm very lucky that within 40 minutes' drive I have five such shops, although with more planning (back to that wiring list again), I would have got everything a lot cheaper over the Internet and not had such an adverse effect on carbon emissions.

The other levers are, as per the original, red for signals and black for points. They are however arranged in the same order as the items they operate, because the prototype layout might lead to confusion during an exhibition.