Lighting up the layout, Point clipping and Loading the wagons

Hello again,

Recently, I have made a few developments with wiring on the layout. In fact, some lights have been installed 'in-situ'. The newspaper stand and the station have a light each at the bottom of both buildings (hopefully this will be changed to make the station building more realistic). Some soldering has been required between the wires; the battery topper and the wire, then the wire and the lights and holes have been drilled successfully in the baseboard. The wire can make it through the gap in the middle of the Hornby platform section.

The newspaper stand

The station

Points. Something that every model railway builder has to deal with. Since the current in a point usually only goes the way that the point is set, you must clip the points if you wish to have the points set one way and run trains on the section not selected - an essential for my layout, with the shelf requiring power alongside trains running on the loop section. An interim solution for 'point clipping' was to just put staples in them, but that proved rather troublesome. Instead, I have decided to get a small bit of stripped wire and solder it in. Simply cut away a small bit of plastic and solder some of the wire to the point, creating a permanent solution to point clipping for barely any money at all!

An example of one of the points - you can just about see the wire around the middle of the point.

Freight trains are an essential part of my layout, but I only have a few wagons at the moment. Due to a few - shall we say... accidents - with coal, recently the wagons have been running round empty. However, I now trust myself and have refilled them.

Chalk/limestone is in barrels in the 'Breedon & Cloud Hill' wagon.

The 'Glenhaford' wagon, complete with charcoal

'T. Threadgold' will be running with Shredded Wheat, intended to represent hay/straw 

From a fish tank, purple pebbles will do for iron ore.

So that's Brunswick Junction for now, the Romford model railway exhibition is tomorrow (Saturday 11th), so there'll hopefully be another post with some new goodies coming soon!