70. London Station Update at McKinley Railway.

hello welcome to McKinley a few months back I did a video entitled London's burning well we've been getting on with rebuilding London and I'm going to hand over to James to let him tell you all the work we've been doing [Music] [Applause] [Music] Hello everybody welcome back so we're in London and this is very different to the stuff you see me doing before this isn't a new build this is a refurb we're taking what was London and you've seen footage of this before the big canopy and all the buildings that were on it this is all gone so the first thing we had to do was carefully remove all the buildings remove all the vaccines anything that was loose bits and pieces of detail the buildings at the front we've stripped all that back down so we can start working on it and getting it up to the spec that we need it to be before we can start on the top we've got to work on the underside of it and particularly the tracks that run underneath so we're going to show you that first so in order to lift up London it was originally designed with hinges and you can see them at the back some of them are painted blue to match the skyline and we've put some new hinges in the silver ones I'll explain in a minute why we put new ones in but the whole section lifts up it's actually split into two sections one for the engine shed one for the main station and now we're going to lift it up and show you what's underneath so here we are London is now propped up we've got a nice strong prop stop it from falling down so we can work on it and the reason why we lifted it up apart from getting to all the wires and in the underneath is these tracks that are running through right here now there's actually two sets of tracks there's the lower tracks that run around in the semi-circle they're staying but these tracks these are our red and green main line and they used to run around in a semicircle and come out the back see the old piece that we cut out no longer required now what's happening is the tracks now instead of going around in this semicircle they're going out through the wall behind us and you can see the cutouts in the wall and you can see the extension through there and these are going to join onto the extensions so the trains running through Sheffield that you've seen in other videos are going to run through here through the old room and back out again now the problem with removing the tracks was the levels currently well originally this track was lower than the track at the back and it wound its way up climbing almost to the same level as London the tracks on the other side are at different levels so we had to make an adjustment they're almost similar through so the back tracks wanted to remain level as opposed to dropping down the problem is there's not enough height clearance under London to do that so we've had to modify London which I'll show you when we drop it down but we've cut away the tracks at the front didn't need to change too much we've just leveled it through made some slight adjustments to make it smoother and it flows straight through the wall the other advantage of being lift it up it means we can get to all the wiring and things we had to do underneath there's lots of new devices going in as you can see we've been adding in bits and pieces that are hanging down it does make it easier than lying on your back when you can stand here and work on them as they stand now we're going to put London back down and show you what we're doing on the top one of the first things we had to do was to cut the corner of the back of London out to make room for the new tracks that are coming through and you can see them coming through where they disappear through the wall and they're a lot higher as I originally said than where they were when they used to come through on the semi-circle in order to do that we've trimmed the back of London we've removed the vaccine that was there we even had to shorten Platform One by about 30 centimeters to make it look like there's still a platform there between that and what's going to be the new vaccine so that's all been done and now the New London hinges without hitting the new raised up tracks at the back that's the other reason for the new silver hinges that we had we had to move the original hinge along to the right it was found in the new lines next thing we needed to do where we removed what was the old postal Depot this is the new goodyard for London lots more used factories going to go in here different Industries working very similar to the videos that you've seen before with Halifax and Wakefield we're going to have areas where we drop off different types of wagons parcel wagons various bits of pieces there's a bullion area dropping off gold that's coming in and this whole area is going to have RFID this is the other stations have uncouplers and all the various bits and pieces challenge that we have here is the track below it's very close to it there's not a lot of distance there at all so we have to do things on the point Motors that are going in we can't Mount them directly under the points they have to be offset so the point matter is about here driving a bar things like that we've had to think about as we're building it it was never designed the way we're using it now other modifications that we're making the main platforms were designed eight coach trains and we're making them so they still take agriculture trains but also a pair of dmus we can increase the volume of traffic through the station in order to do that we've got to put in more blocks RFID protections more signaling the various things that go with running Railway and that method the point Motors on the railway we're going to be taking them all off and servicing them and this is what we have been using up until now the tortoise Point motor and we had everything prepped and ready to use these although we might be making a change and Dave is going to talk to you about that later talking about the Headroom underneath the layout we had to think about what was the largest thing to run on the railway and all the for us although it's a British Railway we do use European stock this is our one of our vacuum cleaning trains it's the tallest thing we have on the railway so that's what we've been using as a guide to make sure it runs underneath everything because it's surprising even when you're building things stick down this is a electro magnetic uncoupler for the kdn couplers and when it's mounted on the railway you can see it sticks down quite far so we're gonna have to think about how we're going to fit these in this new yard because there's the tracks underneath we can't have anything hitting the roof of the trains at the other end of the station we have the engine shed and we'll show you now what we've been doing in there so the other end of London we've got the engine facility and we've done quite a bit of work here as well mainly changing all the points the points that were originally laid here were medium-sized points and some of the large steam engines although we went through them they clicked a bit as they went through and sometimes derailed so we've changed all the points now for large points and that meant digging up the ballast and the track that was in here but it's going to be worth it in the long run all the point Motors that were in here have been removed for servicing um some of them were 20 years old they've been in quite a while and it brings everything up to you know a reliable standard we're also fitting RFID in here as well in the engine shed so we can monitor when engines are getting cold when they're getting watered when they're getting re-diesled refueled if they're a diesel engine that sort of thing with new track you can easily put rfids and fit them under the track I've done that in these two new sidings here cut a hole in the cork the RFID fits in nice and easy but what do you do when you have existing track you don't want to be removing any more than you need to when it's been Scenic ballasted Etc so how do you get around that what we've designed or had designed is an RFID reader that fits between the rails all you need to do is drill down the hole for the wire this fits down either with a pair of track pins so the trains can run over it the actual wire on the end plugs into the transmitter and this communicates for the rest of the system through Wi-Fi but it's quite unsightly to have that between the tracks so what do you do and we've designed a 3D printed fake Timber cover that drops over the top of the RFID clips into place and we've already used some of these in the engine shed which you can see over here so once all the new Point workers in in the new track work what else do we need to do we've mentioned about servicing the point Motors we also have other things to service such as the motor in the turntable that's been there for 20 years it's done lots of revolutions it could do with a refurb the lamps that are on the railway most of them work but some of them have been knocked over the years so we're going to make sure they're all working they're all straight add some new lamps in where they need to be the signals will need paying attention to some need adjusting and changing we're going to be looking at the vaccine having a new support for it a new photographic vaccine is going to be going in then it's all the buildings for London and that sort of thing but also importantly all the wiring that's underneath what's in there is good it's been working for 20 plus years but we're going to make sure it's all secured properly we're going to replace a few bits and pieces there's all the additional wiring that's going to be going in for the new devices we're going to make sure it's all stowed properly so it's all out of the way of the Rails underneath and it's good for a further 20 years not lose sight of the control panel that used to sit behind me that's going to get upgraded as well the one on my behind my shoulder here is going to be a digital display rather than the physical one that we had before and we're also going to have a new control panel for London for all the points very similar to the ones that you've seen in Sheffield Wakefield and Halifax nice new design nice new clean and fresh so that's all the technical side but let's not lose sight of all the scenery that's got to be done all the fine details all the scratch buildings there's going to be a new signal box we're going to extend the platform shed we're going to put more Lighting in all the vaccine all the things are going to make this as special as it needs going to be I'm now going to hand over to David he's going to give you a bit more information on the tortoise Point Motors and the issues that we've been having so we've been making great progress on London but there's been one Calamity which we didn't anticipate and it's to do with our Point Motors our beloved tortoise Point Motors what we found we've had an inkling that something was going wrong before and we'll make a specific video about this there is a effectively a latent defect in the there's a switch arm inside these tortoise Motors that controls the two switches that come up that do this that come out the top here and we use both switches on McKinley one to control the Frog polarity and the other one to send switch feedback this is a good switch arm here both of these switches are held firmly in place by these four plastic lugs that have been melted so to speak or welded down however what we started to notice was that when we started to look at our tortoise Motors on the main layout they're starting to fail they're only five years old you can notice this one is loose because this lug has sheared it gets worse this one we've got both switches are broken they're loose and actually on some tortoises it's so bad that both are gone and both sets of these fossa bronze switches are lying in the well so we're going to do a specific video on what we're going to do about the 192 Point Motors on the existing layout which all go back in this room they go back 20 years so I've had a good service light out of these motors and the motors themselves are all working perfectly they move the points that none of them are failing on a motor capacity it's the switches which have the problem and we're going to work out whether we do some bolting repairs to these things which we figured out a way of doing or whether we replace them with something else but we make that the subject of a more detailed video thanks for watching [Music] thank you

Channel: McKinley Railway

Views: 11,631

Keywords: London Station Update, mcKinley 70, mckinley, McKinley Railway, mckinley model railway, McKinley time machine, David Townend, london station, London's Burning, Chadwick Model Railway, Upgrading model railway, designing a model railway, Model railway design, Time machine, Hades, model railway, model railroad, building a model railway, building a model railroad, Model railway operation, Charlie Bishop, model railway building

Id: dwTxy3uVOHQ

Length: 11min 46sec (706 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 01 2023