Trains running

With all the spline complete for the first section, I moved back to the flat area where Hardin, MT sets. Hardin has a sugar factory of its own along with several grain elevators. There is still a very nice brick, one story passenger station. There used to be stock yards and a freight depot. I'm not going to model the sugar factory, since there is one in Billings. Instead, I'm adding a long spur that comes off the industry siding that will probably have a beet dump on it. 

I started using the caulk again, but moved back to the tried and tested method of track nails and spikes. I like the ability to move track around as I need.

With the track down, I moved on to wiring. I don't generally like to route the bus wires thru the joists, but I am concerned about wires hanging down into the bottom level, so I went ahead and and put them thru.

I like to separate blocks in case I decide to come back and add detection. I toed all the sub-busses together using this terminal strip.

I got these Tortoise's from John McBee. John had soldered wires and added terminal strips. This isn't my preferred method of connecting to tortoises, but I decided to take advantage of John's hard work.

I've also stayed away from suitcase connectors, but after seeing several large layouts use them with a lot of success, I decided to try them and not to solder all the drops to the sub-busses.

I use resistance soldering tweeters to solder drops to the rails. The drops are 22 gauge solid and the busses are 12 gauge stranded. I used to use nothing but solid bus wires because you can bend them and they stay. Also, if you are stripping them to solder drops to, you're less likely to break wires like you are with stranded.

Here's a full shot of the peninsula right before I ran the locomotive down the spur across the switch to the industrial siding.

Here's a Youtube video of the GP9 running.