FIrst some of the fiddle yard points had to be relaid using insulated joiners on the frogs.

The front half of the layout had had the solenoid point motors fitted on short standoffs under the board. This made the motor about 15mm away from the underneath of the basboard and so about 20mm away from the point itself. The idea was to reduce the shock at the point blades of the snap of the solenoid.

On the fiddle yard there were so many point motors to fit I decided to mount them on wodden blocks to space them and then to attach them to the blocks using velcro. This meant that motor position could be adjusted before pushing the motor onto the velcro. In the long term this was a good and bad idea. Good because it meant that solenoids could be replaced easily but bad because over time the velcro glue oozed and some of the velcro came away from the block or the motor. Once the velcros were glued onto the block and the point motor with UHU glue the problem didnt come back.

More DCC concepts 8 way solenoid drivers were fitted to drive the fiddle yard points.

Over time some of the drivers on these boards failed. The suggestion was that the outputs of the drivers, each of which had its own Capacitor Discharge Unit, were not being discharged properly before work on the output pins was done. On these early models there were no discharge push buttons and even though I was careful with discharging them I still had failures. The other problem with these boards was that they had no memory for where the point was set last time they were powered. This meant that if the DCC track voltage went off and then came back again you had to reset every point motor to get the frog relays on the board to match the point position. It looks like here I have learned and not used the frog relays to power the fiddle yard point frogs. After a few years these have been replaced with the latest version of the DCC Concepts 8 way solenoid driver but I still dont think I use the built in frog relays.