Wiring the new staging yard

Although some wiring is continuing, most of it was done in the ten days to 5th April by Richard and Steve, with significant input by Dave (& even a couple of hours by the hard-working Gareth!).

All the droppers are connected onto track buses – one ‘westbound’ and one ‘eastbound’.

The approach for the turnouts has been to use Peco turnout motors on the Peco turnouts. These are connected through to ‘frog juicers’ built to a published circuit by a member of Merseyside MRS. These are supposedly more reliable than the physical switches that sit on the motors which are currently still in use on the scenic section. Frog juicers are necessary because electrofrog turnouts are used. The turnout motors are connected in fours to MERG boards, made up by Derek Jones of MMRS. This type of MERG board has a DCC accessory feed (two wires) and a trickle charge feed (two wires) to charge the capacitors.

Finally, a Lenz expressnet link is fed through and taken to DIN sockets on the sides of the board wherever one is needed. The total 12 wires for each (most) boards are connected from board to board using a wiring loom fed into Mate-n-Lok 12 pin connectors which look like a cheap and reliable connection option.