August update

August was mostly wiring, which doesn't make for very great blog entries. Katy and I did move all the cars that I had gotten out and move them to the yard.

One of the more interesting events to happen in August was a train derailed on the tracks that go by our house. It was crossing Denton creek north of Roanoke on 8/21/16 when it happened. It just so happened that I was at Home Depot in Roanoke picking up something for the layout, wire I think, when it happened. When I started north out of Roanoke headed home, I saw a bunch of police cars, etc. on on the highway where it crosses Lake Grapevine.

It wound up taking two spans of the bridge out, which are blocked by those trees. The trees were all removed during the cleanup. Now there are concrete sections in their place.

Nothing ran for a couple weeks. On 8/23 this went by while I was at the post office in Argyle.

One of the projects I tackled was adding a booster. Until then I had just been using the command station.

In the mean time, I worked my way around the layout adding drops and connecting them to the sub-busses. Once all the track had power, I moved on to hooking up the Tortoises. I used NCE SwitchIt circuits to power the Tortoises. 

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.