After getting hold of a locksmith who drilled out the lock that my key broke in on the security gate protecting my store room with my model railway in it, was finally able to gain access again and do some work.
What I have been doing you can see in the pic below.
Top Left - Made a long (white) rod with a track cleaning rubber on the end so I can get at and clean the tracks in my covered Station.
Top Right - Attached the mini-hoover adapter I made for my car engine (using a couple of different diameter rubber pipes) and sucked up surplus track ballast with it that was getting inside my engines.
Bottom Left - Found an old 12 Volt mobile phone charger , and replaced the phono plug at the end with 2 crocodile clips which can use as a temporary track supply, or for testing the workings of engine motors & bogies when in a cradle (the "electric" brush I made when attached can be used to clean engine wheels by feeding power to the motor making the wheels rotate and clean themselves).
Bottom Right - Just an experiment with different settings on my camera to see what gives the clearest non-close up picture (the photo shown was taken using the "landscape" setting on my Canon Rebel DSLR).
(http://i379.photobucket.com/albums/oo231/Tdmak/Model%20Railway/MadeTools.jpg) (http://s379.photobucket.com/user/Tdmak/media/Model%20Railway/MadeTools.jpg.html)
Nice bit of ingenuity there mate! With regards to the best settings on your Rebel, Set it to A (aperture value) on the top dial, put the aprerture at f/22 (or f/16 depending on lens) set the ISO at 100 or 200 and it will give you a nice long exposure with loads of depth of field. You may need to use some exposure compensation to brighten it up but this will only lengthen the exposure. If you shoot in RAW, you'll be able to adjust your white balance afterwards on the computer using DPP (if you don't have a post processing program).