Well my internet was taken out by some egads with a mechnical digger so I've not been able to do much with the computer or testing for SSS which has been quite annoying, internet is so terrible still that browsing is still bad, but gave me time to tackle some layout stuff.
I looked at alot of stuff and took a fair bit of advice for the layout and managed to pick up Hornby Magazine's recent layout design manual magazine which covers quite alot of topics, interesting enough mention of their Operation Build it! popped up. I looked into it and mulled over it and came up with the following as I hope, a final design the the layout:
What the plan basically becomes is a Branchline terminus with a small goods yard and engine shed which can be either two road or single road and the track runs off right like previous designs onto either a fiddle yard or another scenic section.
I also unfortunately had to swap all my pointwork for peco pointwork as the hornby settrack pieces have horribly large plastic diamond deadzones which utterly kill 0-6-0 tanks, granted I now basically have the peco version of settrack pointwork but it runs alot better and looks better to, ideally for DCC you want to use electofrog pointwork but its A. expensive by a large margin B. requires soldering modification and other bits to really make them work right.
The 9F, Jinty, standard 4 2-6-0, ivatt 4 and 56xx all work fine over this pointwork tho the 9F requires to sit on the straighter sections due to the 2-10-0 wheel arrangement. However the pannier 5870 class is having issues with its pickups on both dc and dcc and I've done everything possible to try and get it to run well, so that is probably going to the shop for repair/problem solving.
Some sad news however is my Q1 seems to have stopped working well after weathering, even though pickups and wheels are clean its having some serious issues picking up power and I think it could be the way it connects to the decoder socket, so the Q1 might go into storage while I source some parts and find out costs to fix it up.
On another note I should be able to finally start laying the foam underlay from woodland scenics and getting the track down with the new peco stuff and hopefully start to get something looking like a railway going. Abit of a setback with the above things going on, but suppose thats the love and hate relationship of building a layout.
Shopping list left to get:
Soldering iron + wire to start doing power feed droppers and creating a DCC bus wiring
Another tub or 2 of woodland scenics grey blend ballast.
impregnated plaster cloth to create hardshell landscape bits.
Coal staithe kit/bachmann version already built.
So I'm getting there, slowly but surely, some setbacks but alot of fun still and I'm learning quite abit and not so "afraid" of dismantling a loco to find if there is anything wrong with it, before I'd be quite hesitant but messing around with the locos has helped alot to understand how it works and it also shows how simple these locos are under the chassis and well..how crazy the mark up price is for body parts of the loco.