Once I had built some signals and was able to control them from my JMRI computer through the NCE system I was using, I needed a way of triggering the signals to change. Since the track layout was finished and relatively stable I did not want to cut a lot of rails to create blocks in the track so that I could detect using current sensors. I tried out some magnetic sensors and found a magnetic triggered transistor that I could embed in the track and which created a pulse when a magnet went over it
The layout had got stored and in the meantime I was helping to run our club layouts with Preston and District Model Railway Society. I had not been looking forward to wiring Coketown. It already had at least two 25 way D-Type connectors coming from each of the front baseboards; one for track circuits and one for point motor drives. All of the OO gauge layouts we took out were DCC and seeing how they went together and how easy they were to wire I looked into the possibility of running Coketown wi
Since my gallery has been broken for a while I thought I would take my photos and this time turn them into a Blog. This is going to be a bit more of a retrospective in that all this stuff happened in the past. Since I would probably still build the layout in the same way though it might be useful to show how a layout comes together.
Coketown was to represent a Lancashire mill town with a lot of history from Victorian times but with modern railways running through it. Coketown itself
