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 with DCC. Most of my OO gauge stock was already DCC.

By 2014 there were plenty of N gauge locomotives and DMUs available with 6 pin DCC sockets including the Dapol Super Voyagers I already had. I spoke to a supplier at one of our Preston shows and bought the NCE Powercab. Time to get back onto the layout.

This was where I had got to with DC. One D-type connector for track circuits and one for point motor control. One of the two is just out of view. The main track circuits were powered from the copper bus bars made out of mains house wiring. One pair for each direction. The mainline would be permanently powered from a DC controller and then the various switchable sections powered through the D connectors from the control panel that had never got built. Power between boards was through 4 pin XLR connectors. Each baseboard has a male XLR at tone end and a female XLR at the other. My power cable from the controller had a male and female connector so I could power any one or more baseboards while wiring.

The first thing I did next was to take off the D connector cables. Since the droppers from the track and the solenoids for the point motoros were all wired to screw terminals this was relatively easy. Then I joined up all of the various switched track sections that now just needed to go to either Red rail or Blue rail for the whole layout. At the beginning all of the layout was connected together by a single DCC feed. This was one of the first panels to have all of the wiring removed and the track circuits all joined to a single feed.

Since a lot of the points did not have insulated rail joiners on the two rails from the frogs I either had to lift points to fit the insulated rail joiners or in many cases simply slit the rails a little way away from the frogs. I could have left the sidings powered from the frogs as some were when it was DC powered but that would mean locomotive lights turning off when the DCC was removed from the siding. In the end all sidings were DCC powered and all frogs were isolated one way or another.

Once I had one board wired for the track I could try out the new controller.

I chose the early DCC Concepts solenoid point motor drivers for DCC point control. Initially these were wired onto the track circuit since I only had the single NCE Powercab. Also to make life easier the crossing at one end of the layout got a 6 way frog juicer that covered the crossing and all of the points around it. Initially other points on the layout were either left with the blades as frog contacts or the point motor contacts were wired to the frog.

Now the wiring for the front of the layout was looking like just a single 4 way XLR connector between each pair of boards.