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Chapter 4 - 11/09/2006

This chapter of Adam's Corner comes to you from the exciting location of the Wuiske Couch… Home to all things associated with terminal boredom and two neurotic cats who have developed a fascinating relationship with a pair of crutches.

On Friday afternoon whilst working on the layout I was doing my normal routine of continually going up and down the stairs to answer the phone when on my return I managed to do a special little dance centering around the bottom step… I was really quite proud and expect to be inducted into the dance hall of fame soon.

This resulted in me twisting my ankle into an unnatural position. So it hurt a bit, that shouldn't matter… Should it? Of course after doing this I did the logical thing and waited for Jade to get home and get her to help me do some more work on the layout for about three hours. Obviously after performing a masterful stroke of genius like this I managed to see just how high my pain threshold was the next morning. So aside from discovering that the people responsible for selecting the "quality" programming on Australian television should be dragged out on the street and shot, not much else has happened.

Prior to my amazing stair dance recital, I did manage to get a fair amount of progress made on the layout.
The Lenz Digital system arrived and was quickly installed and tested. I must say, this IS the only way to power a layout. Due to the size of the layout (around 300 foot main line), I need to divide the layout into three roughly equal sections for power allocation as otherwise voltage drop will become an issue. In each of these sections, a "Booster Unit" is to be installed.
The peninsula that will become Holmes Passing Loop has been built and is starting to look more like one of the engineering marvels of the world than a
layout. The problem wasthat the loop has a radius of 40 inches on the inner line and 42˝ inches on the outer. This means that the overall width of the frame work at this point is around 8 feet. All of this is done without the addition of support legs to aid with vacuuming and to make it possible to change the carpet when we want without causing too many problems. Click for large photo!
The loop has a 1 in 50 gradient, this is the maximum gradient to be used on the layout. At present there is 140 feet of track laid and tested. This represents around a third of the layout.
I know that a few of you out there are intending to fit digital decoders to your locomotives and run them on DCC. All I can say is "Go for it". As our layout is mainly single track, I can run multiple trains at one time without the need for blocking sections. There is also something amazing about being able to run multiple through trains whilst shunting in the yards and industries on your layout. Click for large photo!

Hopefully my ankle will soon be well enough for me to walk on and I shall be back at work installing more track to start getting the hidden section of the layout built.

We shall see how we go.


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