So this post has been a long time coming – the work it details was completed back at the end of the summer, however life has conspired in such a way that I’ve not had a lot of time in the loft with the railway, and therefore not taken the missing photos to document the progress.

Over the summer I had an opportunity to spend a lot more time in the loft working on the railway than normal.  This was all thanks to South West Railways deciding that the best way to length the platforms at Waterloo was to not run any trains to our local station for 3.5 weeks over the summer holidays.  That combined with completely ridiculous rail replacement buses and road works on the route to the next nearest station meant that I worked from home for most of the period.  This in turn meant that by not commuting for over 2.5 hours each day I could get more time working on the railway.

So over that period I got into a pattern of working in the loft, and the track started going down at quite a pace.  The reality was that much of the simpler track work had been done, and what was left were the cross overs on the viaduct and the points that lead to both stations.  So this mean laying 7 sets of points which practically run continuously from one to another, with all the associated work around point motors and wiring.

While all the track is down, I had a deadline to hit of a visit from friends with boys who were interested in the model railway.  As a result I didn’t quite get a chance to wiring in a couple of the point motors, and instead hard-wired the frogs for now.  However I did reach the stage by the end of August of being able to run trains successfully round both the main loops of track.

Since then this has managed to keep the children of various friends and family very happy watching the trains going round and then requesting different rolling stock and they preferred.

So onto the photos to see how it progressed and where it is now…..

So what next?  The next stage probably needs to be quite a lot of wiring work.  I mentioned the points which need wiring in properly with point motors and frog switching.  There are also still points in the yard section that need this also, so enough there to keep me busy for a while.

The next task after that will be to look at control panels to allow me to get beyond the two loops and a double controller.  However I think that probably needs to be another post in its own right…..