Moana 10: Do the Loco-motion

DB says: The sum of all fears. I hate soldering. I hate it with a passion. Moana has been stuck for months now waiting for some solder. Today I soldered.

Firstly, the Tortoise is pretty neat all wired up with a centre-off reversing switch to (temporarily) a 9v battery. I've used hidden rods to operate points before, but this is oodles better. It even sounds like a real point motor as it winds over. The downside is that I don't seem to be getting much life out of either of the sets of internal SPDT switches that can supposedly be used to direct power to the point frog. "Hmmm" and "bugger" in equal doses.

For the more mundane, I have a main bus wire with plain old stereo plugs at each end running the length of the module. I have feeds to the track at both ends (single track at the far end, and three tracks just beyond the view blocker in the staging yard) and many of the rail joints are soldered as well. My soldering isn't pretty, but it seems to have worked, as I dusted off my magic DCC box and managed to get a few things working in super smooth slo-mo.

Woohoo!

Now that's a reminder of how long I'd really been out of NZ120 - most of my stuff doesn't have decoders. Sure I had the two DFs working on the Sawyers Bay layout, but they're boxed away at the moment, so I reached for some more other items. DC 4939 works (barely) as does DBR 1213 but it still thinks it's 1267. So later I changed the decoder address but then found #13 is consisted. I need to clear out all the consists from my N scale American days...

My new KiwiRail DX doesn't have a decoder and I don't know if I have any that fit the new Atlas Dash 8 [have just checked on the interweb and supposedly the ones that fit the dash 8-40B's fit the C's as well (yay!)]. The new DFT didn't have a decoder either, but I was able to steal one from a passing Santa Fe SD40-2. It works beautifully. I love those Kato units - they run so smoothly and slowly.

So I guess one of my next tasks is to get a few more locos working.

On the plus side, with some new trees hiding the Tortoise (it's partially buried in the foam hard up against the backdrop and surrounded by the trees behind Rhys's shed), Moana is almost ready to be elevated to its rightful position and plugged into the staging yard. I really should buy some people for the platform, and I still haven't built what I assume was the old stationmaster's house between the station and that hut, but we're almost there.

I don't know whether I've disclosed the Moana module dimensions before: The visible area (seen in it's entirety in the wide angle shot taken at 24mm focal length above) is 210 cm long from the far edge to the view block that the camera is perched on. It's 53cm wide at the view block end under the camera and tapers down to just 33cm at the far end (just one foot one inch wide). Size isn't everything.