Floating Shelf Budget Model Railway Challenge - Part 3 - The Chinese Fat Controllers Arrive

The continuing escapades of building a model railway which fits on a 60cm floating shelf.

Once the track was laid the urge to play with the layout was strong, but I needed power and control.

As is the Budget Model Railway way this comes in the shape of a PWM (Pulse Width Modulation) motor controller from eBay.  I found a bevy of them on AliExpress for a mere £2 each.  They come with a potentiometer to control the speed of the loco and a 3 way rocker switch to control the loco's direction (forward - off - back).

Everything is prewired and you just need to screw the wires into the terminal blocks.  This is where the fun begins as there were no instructions on whihc wire goes where.  The circuit board has some gobledigook on it both in Chinese characters and electronic symbols (which might as well have been Chinese).  Fortunately just a brief googleing brings up a photo of a very similar circuit which explains where all the wires go.

Power from a 12v DC phone charger wallwart (or similar) is screwed into the Positive and Negative terminals at the top of the board.  The connection to the track is screwed into M1 / M2.  The four wires from the rocker switch connect to the terminal block on the left and finally the potentiometer is plugged into the white JST connector.  Easy peasy.

First Running

The initial runs on the track were a whole lot of troubleshooting as usual.  I wired my track feed to the middle "mainline" which meant I had a dead section of track with the topmost fiddle line when the points were switched to the top siding.  This was rectified by adding a second set of power lines.  The routing for this is a little bit sketchy and snakes out of the layout and off the front of the shelf.  This is most unacceptable for a display layout and I will resolve this later.  

Having played with the layout for some hours, I also want to add in a couple of on/off isolating switches, this will mean that if I want to I can isolate a loco on either of the fiddle lines and bring another loco out unimpeded.  This will create a go around.  Currently the loco can only pick up on the left and move to the right, a second loco which operates from right to left will dramatically improve operational potential and allow me to stage rakes on the fiddle yard.

YouTube Shorts

Around this time I also discovered the joys of unedited YouTube shorts.  This has enabled me to make lots of videos of both this layout and my Coffee Table Layout Upper Carrom.  Frankly this has been quite addictive and I should probably check myself into the Betty Ford Clinic.

Obligatory Running Video