Developments during 2010.

Our first exhibition at Mickleover allowed us to identify areas for improvement on the layout, including:

• Improving the track layout in the timber yard; this included building a three-way turnout to give us three sidings and adding a head-shunt for the yard loco.
• Centralising the turnout controls. Our first version had manually operated "wire-in-tube" turnout controls. Although these worked very well the operators had to move from board to board to set routes and reaching some of the more distant controls was difficult.
• Change the fiddle-yard from cassette-based to a large turntable.

Ken designed and constructed the three-way turnout.  We lifted the original track-work in the timber-yard and re-laid it as three sidings, plus head-shunt.

Since our turnouts are land-made we needed a method for locking them in route.  Allen devised a servo-operated system and produced etched parts to operate them.  He also produced our central control board, by re-cycling  an unwanted industrial control box  and adding an exquisite etched panel. We also took the opportunity to completely revise the wiring of the boards, simplifying them in the process.

Finally a new fiddle-yard was built  incorporating a 5' long, 5 track turntable.  We have a lot of odd-ball locos, so the central track is split into 6 sections, so that we can store a selection of locos on it.

We returned to the Mickleover exhibition in January 2011 (although the fiddle-yard was not quite ready) which gave us the chance to really test out the new track.