Point Control

Best laid plans of mice and men...

When I initially planned the layout it was envisioned that it would spend most of its life at home, stood against a helpful wall, controlled from the front and with all points controlled by hand (pointwork consists of Peco Setrack Code 100). Therefore when the baseboards were designed and built and track laid no account was made for possible installation of pointwork controls of either a wire-in-tube or motorised nature.

...do often go awry.

As it turned out a couple of months later (October 2007) I was asked by the Chairman of my local model railway society if I could get the layout completed in time to appear at the next club exhibition (i.e. by August 2008). So then the ideas had to be revised a little: The layout would be controlled from the rear and some form of control system would be required in order to come to some semblance of exhibition standard. I decided therefore, after some research here and there, to install wire-in-tube control to the rear-most set of points (all installed now) and a more elaborate design involving controlling the points using stifwire connecting the tiebars of the pointwork and a stiffpiece of rod via an electrical slide switch (see First Steps in Railway Modelling, C.J. Freezer) for those points in the middle and far side of the layout. In fact last Thursday saw me trying to install the first of these with some difficulty...

Going Digital?

However at the 2008 Nottingham East Midlands Model Raiway Exhibition last weekend I stumbled across the ZTC Controls stand and saw a demonstration of a DCC Point Motor (ZTC 302 Point Motor). This is essentially a solenoid pointmotor with a built-in DCC accessory decoder and which takes power and commands directly from the track. Once you've attached it to the base of your points and soldered the little tabs to the side of the rails no more wiring is necessary unless you have Electrofrog points which requires a single extra wire from the motor to the track to change the frog polarity when needed. If like me however your current DCC controller lacks the ability to control accessories you can wire in a simple push-button manual overide to control the settings. At £12.95 these come a couple of pounds cheaper than getting separate point motors and decoders. After consulting with a fellow club member who was also at the show and who is my go-to-guy for DCC tips (He said that as I was building a DCC layout it would be a waste of potential to use just wire-in-tube control) I went to purchase one or two for my trial on my layout only to discover that the guy had sold out of the units that morning as soon as he opened. Apparently some guy came up and bought 20(!) of the 25 he had brought with him.

Not to worry though. When my next student loan arrives I think I'll set asside £30 to buy them online and have them posted to me.