On the road again

All things being equal, by the time you read this we will be standing around behind Flockburgh at Banbury Model Railway Exhibition.

To this end, the layout was unearthed and set up yesterday to see if it was working. Getting to a show and finding a fault with your model is a whole load of no fun and poking around with a soldering iron when the public are watching does our hobby no favours at all. With any complicated set up, the odd fault is inevitable but I like to avoid these if at all possible even if this does mean spending a few hours checking things over before an outing.

Despite being stored for many months the list of faults was short:

A point motor working in one direction only - One of the wires had fallen off as you can see in the photo. Reattaching took a few minutes once the special exhibition soldering iron (the one with a 6ft long lead) had warmed up. The legs got in the way a little bit but a quick prod sorted things out.

No power to one section of track - Two dry joints at the toe end of a point. Again, a little soldering iron work sorted this after I'd cleaned the area concerned of track dirt. Really I should bond rail joints with bits of wire but I'm a bit lazy about this and if the things work, I don't bother.

All the locomotives seemed to work fine despite their dirty wheels and these were later cleaned up. Considering the trouble we had trying to get everything to work when the layout was constructed, I'm always amazed when turning the power on makes things work. When they don't fall off, amazement gives way to staggeration. I suppose the moral of the story is that you can do anything if you try hard enough. Well, with toy trains anyway.

Anyway, this is the first show of the season. This year I expect to be at Uckfield in October and demonstrating at Warley (NEC) in November. If you want to know more, check out my exhibition diary. See you there.