Extending the baseboard into the window recess and beginning to build the station
From the beginning the plan has always been to have an intermediate station on the branch line up to the higher terminus, and the track with passing loop and through goods siding has long been in place. Until this spring, though, I was concentrating on making Innsdorf, my main station, available for its outing to the Stamford Model Railway Show. There is plenty of news about this in previous posts. With the show over, holidays taken and grandchildren back at school I have been forging ahead with the Alpine pass section of the layout, beginning with Mitteldorf station.
If the station were to be anything more than something painted on a backscene, then I needed to extend the baseboard into the window recess, and the method came to me a couple of weeks ago when I was cleaning the windows in my workshop and stood on a stepstool to reach the window. I raised the venetian blind and thought, “There’s quite a lot of room here, and if I board up the lower part of the window,” my wife’s idea,”then I can fasten an extension board to that and lodge it on a timber planted onto the framing of the main board.” Thus the boarding-up and the extension baseboard would be removable so that window maintenance can still be carried out.
I had a station building kit ready for construction, Kibri’s excellent kit of Davos Monstein station – a station I have seen from passing trains but never had a chance to photograph – and the layout of the station would be based on that at Langweis, on the Arosa branch, which we visited early this year. This kit comes with a basic LED lighting system, which was a bonus because I light most of my buildings. Electricity for lighting would have to be taken onto the extension board with a plug-in lead to retain removability. I would also provide street lighting and would include two or three houses to suggest a village: the rest of the village being painted on the backscene.
While working on the station I have finally cracked the issue of controlling the points. The second-hand Hammant & Morgan motors which I had installed were never satisfactory and no amount of tweaking seemed to fix them, so I have removed them and will be taking them to the recycling centre in due course. In their place I have fixed some second-hand Peco motors which work very well, wired though the capacitor discharge unit on the Mitteldorf control panel so that the pairs of points work together. Just two momentary-contact switches are needed to control access the three roads.
There will also be a level-crossing (as at Langweis), for which I have the correct type of flashing beacons, and the requisite signalling. The intention at present is that the siding will be used mostly for logging trains, and I have a set of forestry workers waiting to be deployed in the vicinity. But that is some months away. First I have to lay the snow (no ballast: it’s hidden under the snow!) and erect the overhead power equipment. meanwhile I can be detailing the buildings and planning the next stretch of the line, through the mountains up to the terminus at Bad Moritz.
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