Insert small section of track.
Make jumpers for rails at board joints.
Fit wires for point/frog continuity.
Run some trains!
Stephen arrived late having travelled by train (during a guards strike), but it gave Laurence and Geoff a chance to get most of the boards up and ready.
A missing, short section of track on the outer, quarry run was fitted by Geoff, who then moved on to adding tails to points for 'manual' switching of the frogs.
Stephen made up sprung clips from solid wire and fitted them at board joints. Where there were PCB joint strips, he soldered jumpers.
Geoff's next task was on the 8-way plug from the bridge board that normally went to the fiddleyard. This required a temporary socket and feed wires added to connect to the first adaptor board tracks. This went smoothly except that when the connection to the bridge board was tested, there was a partial failure. Everyone's attention was trained (!) on the problem that finally required opening-up the control panel and testing right back to the section switches, without success. After lunch, we tried again and found that the quarry line track running into the tunnel had a broken soldered joint on both rails. Whilst a nuisance, we were heartened by the fact that a lot of investigation work that we needed to perform to establish the wiring for future modifications was completed at the same time.
Once repaired, Stephen and Laurence set-up a train each and ran the first trains from old to new boards and both tracks.
There's a lot to do, but we'd reached a major point in the redevelopment of the layout.
