Having finally managed to build a locomotive, my immediate priority was obviously to play with it, and to this end I spent a happy few minutes letting it trundle around the circuit while I planned vast fleets of further locomotives and cackled megalomaniacaly, which isn’t even a word.
Then the locomotive suddenly stopped dead on a set of points. I pushed it back carefully. and let it run forward. It stopped dead again.
I cleaned the points with stiff paintbrush and it ran again. On the face of it, this was a good thing. In fact, it means that the electricity was running through the point rails, instead of the extra switch I had laboriously installed in summer. Points are rather delicate objects, and the idea was to have a backup system so that if a bit of dirt got in them, they’d still work and not just die on me.
As this one had done, in fact.
Still, the train was working, so I left well alone and let trundle around the track again. Until it stopped dead somewhere else.
This time I went through the full range of diagnostic and repair options available to the electrically challenged:
1: Push locomotive back in the hope the fault will magically work.
2: Repeat in the hope that doing it twice will somehow make a difference.
3: Use extensive range of Anglo Saxon vocabulary.
4: Put a post on the NGRM forum in the hope someone will answer my damnfool questions. Again.
After a lot of testing, more use of Anglo Saxon vocabulary, which although designed in a world that had no concept of electrical problems, seemed surprisingly appropriate, and a lot of helpful answers from the good folk of the NGRM forum, the problem was provisionally diagnosed as being the switch that provides power to the diamond.
I changed two switches and tentatively ran a train through the loop. It worked. I cackled megalomaniacaly and went back to planning vast fleets of locomotives…
Fickle and arrogant little electrons; if things ain’t just so, they refuse to play.