Last summer I spent a very pleasant few weeks with Samuel, my son, as we started building his 009 model railway. It was planned to fit into his room at university. (You can see the making of the boards in the 'Bespoke Baseboards' page of this website.)
We decided on mechanical operation of the pointwork and I turned some brass knobs which we mounted by soldering onto some rod obtained by searching around carefully on campsites when taking down the tent and finding tent pegs left by other people - I had a sufficient stock of fairly OK mild steel rod which was ideal for the purpose.
The 'rodding' was via sub baseboard levers made from printed circuit board - just an experiment - with turned brass bushes. This view shows a double lever for working a cross-over, the primary lever being just to get the operating knob to the geographical centre of the cross-over.
I enjoy layout wiring and it was good to be able to show Samuel how to do this. I use copper wire obtained cheaply from scrap merchants wound around the exposed countersunk heads of screws for the bus-bars. We were using some old connectors which I had bought cheaply one time from the local electrical factors which I gather used to be used for kitchen cupboard lighting - they didn't have any when I went back for some more.
We worked away for hours at this - several times late into the night - and it was a special time for me.