The middle station needs no power feed of its own, being powered by the controllers at the two termini (well, just Innsdorf at the moment, but the mountain terminus, Bad Moritz, will have one in due course), but it does need its points and signals to be controlled locally, and I have built a small panel to hold the switches for these.
To operate the points I decided not to use the Hornby/Peco type of motors that I used at Innsdorf which left a big hole under each point that was hard to hide, but rather to use some second-hand Hammant & Morgan motors I happened to have, along with an ancient Tri-ang motor that probably dates from my childhood but still works. The H&M motors are used in the same way that I used when I added electric point operation to Kingsgate: a rod through a small hole in the baseboard between sleepers near the point, with a stiff but springy steel wire soldered into a deep groove in the end of the rod and hooked into the tie-bar of the point – stiff enough to push the point blades across but flexible enough to absorb excess movement. The Trip-and motor is mounted above the board and will be hidden in the scenery.
The track layout at this station is simply two loops off the single track and as the points at each end of each loop will always be changed together there was no complex insulation needed to avoid shorting the live-frog points, and provided I used a capacitor-discharge system to provide the “oomph” I could change both points at once with one momentary contact switch for each loop. These are toggle switches so it is hopefully going to be instinctive to operate … A switch is also provided at each end of the panel for the starter signals.
The power controller that will eventually be used at Bad Moritz, the proposed top station, has a socket for a hand-held second controller and I shall be able to use this in the event that train control is needed at the intermediate station, for shunting, for example, or for running a locomotive round if I decide to terminate trains here for some reason.
There is still much to do here electrically so rather than make you all wait until it’s finished, this video is a bit of an interim report. More to follow when I get a bit further with the project!
Innsdorf Modellbahn 