Silver Sidelines

How to construct the baseboard? This question seems to be asked on a regular basis. I will describe my own experiences. The woodwork in progress I have used the same basic approach for all three of my ‘big’ layouts. I would say it is my variation of the ‘L’ Girder technique. ’L’ Girder overview according to CJ Freezer I spent some time this weekend searching through old periodicals to see if I could find the original article that inspired me to use the ‘L’ Girder technique. No luck – I think it was a US layout. I did find an article in the Railway Modeller from September1969 which linked back to an earlier article from October 1966 which I do not have. These articles provide a useful overview of the technique but differ slightly in detail from my own practice . For my basic structure I made ‘L’ girders by screwing and gluing 1x2 inch planed timber to the top of 1x3 inch planed timber to form an inverted ‘L’. PVA provides the bond and a few strategically ...

A few weeks back I posted somethoughts on the need for and the use of Capacitor Discharge Units (CDUs) with Peco solenoids. I reported that after some thirty years of model train operation I had now installed my first Capacitor Discharge Units. Under baseboard Gaugemaster Capacitor Discharge Unit At the time I did not see a great improvement in point operation. In a couple of cases the operation was worse after installing the CDU than previously with the power supplied directly from 16v auxiliary supply from my Gaugemaster DS controller. I suggested that the there was a problem with the quality of the push button momentary contact switches that I was using. Some of these switches had been in use for over thirty years on three different layouts. It was explained that without a CDU there was likely to be problems, not with operating the solenoids but with switching the current off after solenoid operation. Further that switching off larger currents as needed to operate two p...