With a combination of supply difficulties and my own lack of focus, there's been little visible progress recently. I've been focussing on Steinrücken as I had a delivery of points for it, and already had tortoises in stock. I copied Will Vale's mods on the peco points, aside from the diaganol sleeper- the formations I've laid so far don't really make this noticable. This actually marks a return to Peco for me, owing to dissatisfaction with Tillig ones with NEM wheelsets. I still like Tillig's flexi, aside from the short lengths which mean lots of fill-in sleepers.
After putting in alignment dowels I decided to lay the track afresh rather than messing about, so redesigned the layout, for the better I hope. This gives a much gentler curve on the platform roads, and I think in fact the sharpest curve will be gentler than before- the picture below shows the new curves, with one of the original platform tracks still in place just to the right of the double slip. There's a couple of posed trains for flavour, the typical dostos of the local services and 155 034-2 (thanks to Maxstafford!) on the Berlin-Malmö InterRegio. With a tip-off from Supaned, I now have more information about the passenger services than I can hope to use, just need to nail the freights now!
I'm putting in far more insulated joiners than you might expect on a DCC operated layout, as I want to have a proper signalling system. At this moment I'm gravitating towardsMERG's RPC, probably with MRCCC on both cost and familiarity grounds- although the interface will look British, I should be able to work the German aspects. I've set the Peco points up for frog switching using the Tortoises, one aspect in which I found them preferable to Tillig. They're so easy to make this modification to, set up ready for it with clear instructions as well. I'm using short lengths of copper clad under the baseboard for terminals, nice and easy to solder multiple wires to.
I've now run out of flexi track, rail joiners and need two more points for the revised design, all except the flexi are already ordered, just the Christmas post adds a bit of extra delay.
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