Page 10 - NMRA Roundhouse January-February 2020

Cassette Connections
Dave Bush
Old Dock Design - My first attempt at building a cassette and dock using crocodile clips for alignment and electrical continuity - photos by Dave Bush
MODELLING ARTICLE
M ost of my previous layouts have had the luxury of large
ladder style fiddle yards,
however I have recently limited my exhibition layouts to about
1.5 metres.This means I now tend to model short lines or industrial yards that would rarely see more than a single loco working at any one time.
In order to maintain the viewers at- tention, there needs to be something moving, which means on a small layout with limited trackwork, the staging must work efficiently.The average viewer probably watches for little more than five minutes, during which time they want to see a variety of motive power and rolling stock which for me is about five transitions. I also now operate from the front of the layout, so when nothing is running on the layout, there is usually something to watch as the cassettes are being loaded or changed on the staging.
The cassette rack from my Austrian H0 layout, since I operate from the front the cassettes are in public view and often result in visitors seeing specific locomotives
The operator in effect becomes part of the performance and because I don’t run to a ‘timetable’, I can change the running order and respond to questions and requests from the viewing public.
The design of the cassettes I took from Iain Rice’s book on Shelf Layouts though after a few exhibitions I decided the cassettes needed modification.The initial design used ‘crocodile’ clips to provide both electrical continuity and alignment when connecting to the dock. I screwed aluminium angle pieces to lengths of timber, using an NMRA track gauge to get the two pieces the correct width apart. Just a couple of reminders, apply insulating tape to the outside of the angle pieces otherwise you may feel a slight tingling from the 16 volts AC when you connect the cassette to the dock and you will need to raise the angle piece above the wooden base or cut two grooves in the base otherwise any
stock with large flanges will ride on the base and loose electrical contact. Both of which I learnt through experience!
Originally, I had the cassette simply butt- ing up to the dock which I then connect- ed with two crocodile clips.We found that attaching and undoing the clips became exceedingly tiresome during the length of an exhibition and because I like my layout to be about 1.3 metres high, one had to be careful when reaching over to unclip the cassette, especially if the operator was not as tall as me.
I decided to remove and refit the metal angle pieces, but this time I cut back the timber base on which the aluminium channel was fixed so that it overhung its wooden base by about 30mm.The dock- ing piece was also rebuilt so that it had two pieces of angle sandwiched together, with one piece sitting inside the other in such a way that the bottom piece pro-
ROUNDHOUSE - January/February 2020
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