Model Railway home-brew control box...

The buttons on the left are of press-and-release type and operate the points/turnings. Tapping the left or right button in each pair switches the track in that direction. The large switch top-right swaps power between the two separate sets of track. The smaller switches operate the LED signals. A switch set to left will give a green light for that track and a red light for the right track. Flipping the switch right will set the right hand track to green and give the left track a red signal.

In the below photo the control-box is wired up in analog fashion, with a 9v source to the turning buttons, 5v for the LED signal lights and 16v to power the track. Soon the control box will be all 5v and wired to an Arduino micro-controller which will then send the correct voltages to the turnings / signals and track. This way the setup can also be automated to run by itself.

N-Scale TGV - Using Heat-Shrink Tubing to make new Traction Tyres!

My Lima TGV was having all kinds of trouble when I got it, starting with truly unreliable power delivery through the rails. After stripping the model down I notice that the front wheels are dedicated to electric-pickup and the motor drives the rear wheels only. The contacts that touch the wheels were cruddy, along with the inside of the wheels themselves and it took quite a bit of cleaning and adjusting the contact pieces to get power reliably through the track, which was also cleaned a bit. Next, I found the paper-thin traction tyres had deteriorated to the point of not moving the train forward, rather spinning the rear wheels. The most gradual of starts would produce wheel-spin at the slightest sign of resistance on the track and even once moving the partial tyres were causing the loco to rock side to side and bounce around on the rails. I duly removed the remaining tyres and set about creating new ones, eventually using heat-shrink tubing which works very nicely.