Last weekend we had a great outing to the Macclesfield Show with Brettell Road.  A good time was had by all and the layout performed very well.  Above picture ©Tim Horn and used with permission.

Tim also did a great little video of the layout for which I send my thanks.

As always theres a list of things to do but I think it’s fair to say these are tweaks and improvements rather than dramatic changes.  Theres a small rake of wagons that need looking at as well as a few locos.  I think it’s just a fact of taking layouts to shows that these will always come up.  Bouncing stock around in a vehicle isn’t the best way to care for it, especially with the roads in the UK being the state they currently are.

One of the vees under the bridge (of coarse it is) might be dead.  I will need to investigate.  Because most stock could straddle it at the show and all the steam locos have stay alives fitted it wasn’t something that affected the running.  Who knows, if it is dead, it might have been so for a while and I just didn’t notice!  Also one of the short protectors played up.  The layout is fed from the middle and the DCC power is split either side of this into 3 districts. One for the yard, one for the mainline and one for operating things like points and signals. The one for the yard on the right (as you look at the layout) was still providing short protection but it wasn’t resetting meaning we needed a couple of times to cycle the track power off and on again.  I had a spare board with me but like the vee it wasn’t enough of a problem to worry about at the show.  It’s been swapped now.

Simon spotted there was a height difference of about 1mm between the Dudley scenic end and the fiddleyard so I will look at that and we managed to scratch the paint on the fiddleyard front loading it into the van.  Ive already repainted it but i will rotate the carrying handles so that its naturally always the right way up in the future.

Finally a recurring problem.  At the first show we did with the layout in its current form some of the captive nuts that are used to hold the roof uprights in place bound up and we couldn’t get the uprights off.  Since then I ran a tap through them and they have been fine but last weekend one bound up again.  Luckily the design of the uprights meant they could be taken apart and the offending upright taped to the board to be dealt with at home. The captive nuts have been relocated to the bin and I will use wingnuts going forward.