It's been a long time coming, but the saga of my point motors had to come to a conclusion eventually. You may recall that I played around with surface-mounted solenoid motors, found them to be inadequate, and decided to look at slow-action motors. That's pretty much where things stalled.
Ever since I bought my first 'real' digital command system - the NCE PowerCab - I've been thinking and researching about the possibilities of DCC that go beyond running trains and switching points. Subjects like detection, feedback and automation rear their heads as soon as you start diving deeper into the subject matter. And as I did so more and more, I couldn't stop shaking the feeling that my choice of command station was not optimal.
When we decided to go H0 scale, one of the drivers had been the fact that local model manufacturer Southern Rail Models had announced a model of the Queensland Rail 2300 Class diesel locomotive. Since I see these regularly close to where we live, it made sense to get one of those for our endeavours.
This post should have appeared before the last one, chronologically. However, when I got the new loco and tested my work, I was so stoked that things were working and I was making visible progress, that I just had to fire off a quick post about it.
With the track plan decided upon, and the layout making progress, there was somewhat of a need to test the work being done. I had previously bought a cheap(ish) loco to do exactly that, but it turned out to be DOA, with the shop having no suitable replacement.
It took us a while to come up with this one. We looked at other layouts and track plans, and tried to come up with something that would maximise the usage of our available space, while offering some room for scenic features. Here's what we ended up with.