Some Posts From My Old Blog

As I mentioned in my first post, I had an earlier blog with a number of entries about building handmade turnouts. Unfortunately the blogs’ Wordpress database got borked so I had to start again, but I did manage to retrieve many of the posts.

So without further ado I’ll put them back up.

Post 1 from my old blog - building hand made turnouts:

Even though I have been interested in building an n scale model railroad layout for quite a while now, what really got me interested again were sites like this or this and especially this guy have been building their own turnouts.

They made it look rather easy and they certainly look much better than store bought turnouts, so I was determined to give it a try. This also fits in with my interest of doing as much as I can rather than buying it.

So over Christmas I gave it a go. Armed with a new file and some old code 80 flextrack I began my first adventure into model railroading…

So It begins...again

Well that was fun. It seems that sometime over the last year since I updated my blog, wordpress became borked and all my posts are gone. I do have a backup somewhere but for now I am just going to start again.

So where were we? In my last blog I documented some experiments I made in building my own n scale turnouts, which though time consuming, turned out pretty well. After I’d made a few turnouts I started looking for ways to cheaply and easily activate them. I did some experiments using small rc servos which were successful but I thought they sounded rather noisy. I then tried some ‘muscle wire’ which also worked well though there were some issues.

At some point in the future I’ll try to recreate some of these posts, but for now I am taking a different direction - I am going to try and build my own DCC command station and booster, then see if I can get my new Bachmann Spectrum N Scale GE 44-Ton Switcher up and running. To that effect I now have two Arduino microcontroller boards, so that is where I’ll begin…