Building a DCC Fiddle Yard
This is a project for our Yeovil Town layout. For most of the time Yeovil Town will be used at the club house for members to run OO trains and as a better means of testing new locos and rolling sock so straight through running is essential.
However for exhibitions the layout need to be run prototypical so straight through running will not be allowed on either of the two circuits so each end terminates in its own fiddle yard giving us four separate yards where we run stock into then out of.
Yeovil Town is about 25 feet long so the fiddle yard will be that same length, enough room to keep the whole club happy!
The first decision was what track? Well Yeovil Town is fine-scale OO so equivalent to Peco code 75 but hand made points with SMP type track. We opted for Peco code 100 streamline as this meant we could easily fit any other layout to it in future.
The next decision was Insulfrog or Electrofrog? Well this was going to be a DCC yard so Insulfrog would work and be easy to install however it might be the wrong decision so we opted for Electrofrog on the basis that it can never be the wrong decision just a bit more work.
We chose to have 4 lanes each way with a crossover track between the centre two tracks. Here is how we constructed it
to be continued...