Your Projects

As far as I'm concerned, the only reason for moving house is to build a new layout. Hence I have moved into my new train room (the cellar) in our new (very old) house in Suffolk and as you can see, I have set up the boarding and already have two circuits running around the outside and through the middle. The house itself requires several decades of work to make it habitable but you have to have priorities!!

I started my OOLS collection about eight year ago with a spur of the moment purchase on E-Bay of a brand new Papyrus and have never looked back. I now have all of the locos with the exception of the double tender Flying Scotsman. I use the Live Drive from OOLS club to make life a bit easier and absolutely love the whole concept. As you can see from the above photos, I also run Digital locos on the same layout and often run them together albeit not on the same loop. So the main point of this post is perhaps to demonstrate how I do this if any one is interested.

I have two OOLS controllers as you can see in the photo and one Dynamis digital controller. My aim was to have any combination of the controllers working the two circuits. (I may expand this to include a third at some point). As such I got out my thinking cap and produced a circuit diagram as shown below:-

I bought some switches off E-Bay, three Double pole - Double Throw and one Double pole - Single Throw switches (heavy duty car ones) and using my trusty soldering iron and some spare LEDs proceeded to solder the switches together. I used the wire from some old mains cable that our elecrician left. I figured that should be adequate for the fairly high current used by OOLS locos.

The contruction was tough going and the result looked like the product of a disorientated spider after several pints. Nevertheless, I put the resulting tangle in a home made wooden box and voila.

The top three switches determine which controllers operate which track. The bottom switch links the two tracks together so that both tracks may be operated by one controller. You can see at the bottom of the picture the inputs from three controllers and at the top the two feeds to the loops.

The beauty of this gadget is that by flicking the switches in various combinations you can use any controller for any track and even control both tracks with one controller.

For example lets say I want digital trains on the outer loop and the LS 2 controller to be used on the inner loop, I would leave the first switch on the left in the off position, move the second switch down to LS2 IN, and move the third switch up to DIG OUT. The bottom switch would remain off to maintain isolation between the loops.

On another occasion I want to run the first OOLS controller on the inner loop and the second OOLS controller on the outer loop, then the first switch would be flipped down to LS1 IN, the second switch would be flipped up to LS2 OUT, and the third remaining in the OFF postion. The bottom switch again would remain off to isolate the tracks from one another.

If I wanted to run the whole layout using one controller (probably digital) then the first two switches would be OFF and the third either up or down. The bottom switch would then be switched on which links the two tracks.

I would also note that the two loops are normally electrically isolated from each other with insulating fish plates. Also, to ensure electrical continuity, each loop on the entire layout is supplied by heavy duty copper wire below the board with droppers every meter or so from the track.

In the past I have just swapped the connections whenever I wanted to run a different system but I don't have to now. Life is good.

I have thoroughly tested the system and it works better than I anticipated so if you're ok with a soldering iron, give it a go, and make your life easier.

A NOTE of caution. Be very careful which locos you have on which track, particularly if you are running LS and Digital together. Not quite sure what would happen if you got them on the wrong track, but I doubt it would improve the fuction of your very expensive locos. In this light, I spend a few minutes checking everything carefully, particularly the switch positions and which locos are on which tracks prior to powering up, just to be on the safe side.

Good luck.