Tag Archives: fiddle yard

Canute Road Quay, General

The quay fiddle yard and wiring takes shape

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With the Christmas festivities out of the way for another year, I turned my attention the last couple of days to the fiddle yard and wiring for Canute Road Quay.

A package arrived from Tim Horn the week before Christmas that contained a 1ft x 1ft baseboard specially manufactured with the baseboard top dropped by 4mm to accommodate the depth of the loco cassettes from my Fisherton Sarum layout.  Yesterday I made a start on putting the fiddle yard together.

The Tim Horn laser cut fiddle yard baseframe is assembled, painted and affixed to the main board
The Tim Horn laser cut fiddle yard baseframe is assembled, painted and affixed to the main board

The kit from Tim is designed to have three full height sides but I wanted to modify this and also cut out a section of the front face to accommodate the little control panel and also the DIN 5 pin socket for the controller.
Hopefully the picture left will explain all, after allowing the glue to fully dry it received a  coat of primer including the underside  followed by a top coat of black to match the main baseboard.  The rear full height panel will then incorporate a couple, or possibly three shelves that have been made from the off cuts from the sides. By today the finish pained fiddle yard board is affixed to the main board, although I have still not fitted the shelves as this requires a trip out to get some brackets of some kind.

The wiring between the input feeds from the transformer box (right) via the control panel and to the main board (left) is taking shape.

I have also made a start on the wiring from the control panel to the jumper cables. In the picture below,  taken looking from the rear of the underside of the fiddle yard board towards the back of the control panel housed within the front face, the left hand cable goes to the main board for the control of the four track sections (yes I am still a DC Luddite), five Cobalt point motors, six uncoupling electromagnets and the power feed for the gas and building lights (yet to be installed). The right hand chocolate block will be connected to the cable that will come up from the transformer box that I also use on Fisherton Sarum to provide the required 16V AC and 12v DC supplies.

As you can see I am using 25 way D cable connectors with one half of the plastic housing screwed to the baseboard side to hold them in place. I have also soldered the 25 core cable for the main board to it’s 25 way D connector (am I alone in hating doing that job?) but have not yetinstalled it and this will a job for later this week. I still have the short jumper cable to solder to its pair of 25 way D connectors…