Just working the rails

I've actually had some good time to work on the trains this past week and weekend.  Got a ton of track put down.  Feeling good but, of course, my lovely wife has thrown a huge wrench into the gears with a change of plans on where the layout can go!  More on that later.

So my progress report -

Screwed down the KW side of the layout.  Which sounds easy, but was a bit mental fight as I have the electronics drawer underneath it.  Access going forward is limited to the front two thirds.  Which, if I planned correctly should be fine.  The back third of the drawer is power distro, the Digitrax chief, my PR-3 and a bit of the TC-64.  There's no looking back now !

With the help of my 3 year old son, got a lot done.  He enjoyed using the tweezers to pick up small objects, not so much with the actual help.  Small steps, small steps !

I completed the entire KW yard, and Waterloo is connected to it.  Picture is above.  Added a couple notes about what's going where, possibly.  The only definite is the KW Station in the yard.  This will service GO Transit and VIA Rail.

Notice my mainline is elevated from the spurs and yard.  Got this idea from everyone else...

KW yard to the left, storage and roundabout tracks to the right

Connection from Waterloo to KW is the middle line, the engine is on  the Elmira spur

Of course with all the track work down it allowed me to test it out.  Have to add a few more power feeders, less than I thought actually.  It all seemed to work pretty well.   Next step is to wire up all the servo's and then watch for derailments with my most finicky cars.

Next blog will go into the big change of plans !

Track work and Electronics

So I'm using a proto freelanced approach to Southern Ontario on the CP Rail lines.  Its difficult for me to actually nail down what Cities I want to model... and they'll be more representational than prototypical.   Of course most of what I'm choosing to model are actually on CN Rail lines but... well, I like CP more.  Though I might try to have a bit of CN traffic later... they do have some really nice models..

On my list - for this week - are

• Kitchener Yard and Via/GO Station, with a couple industries (maybe could be Cambridge for the factories?)
• Waterloo industry; really just wanted to get The Brick Brewery and Seagrams !
• Vaughn Inter-modal and general yard.  CP's major inter-modal is the Vaughn but I wanted other general stuff too. 
• Maple Via/GO station - I needed a station after Vaughn, so chose Maple.  No reason really, its at least got a bit of history to it.  
• St Thomas - can't do anything train related without a mention of it.  'sides the kids love Thomas and the travelling show comes here.

I flip flop on KW (Kitchener Waterloo) or using Brampton and Mississauga.  There's a nice small yard near work here for CP Rail in Mississauga, and Brampton is where I live and has some interesting industries which includes Bacardi Rum.  You might notice the number and importance of brewers in my model rail road.  Coincidence I think.  

That's the planning part - which is sort of independent of the trackplan.  I know it shouldn't be but that would be the freelanced aspect of my approach!  

Here's the track plan with a few cities on it so far.  I'll be detailing it up a bit more as I make up my mind on what's where.

That's all the planning and what not.  Here's what I've worked on.  Did the track area from St. Thomas to Waterloo, and then all the spurs in Waterloo. 

Put in the servo's for the switches on a Tam Valley Quad.  Wired up and worked it out.  There's a few ways for servo's to be mounted now, but I tried out the brass tube method.  First one was easy easy easy.  Damned if the next ones made me almost resort to my old methods!  what a pita (pain in the ass) installation.  But I persevered and finished them - except one but it has its own challenges.  That particular one is resting on a support so things have to be moved and will take a bit more thought.  

In my previous layout I discovered that the Quad could get out of sync with JMRI's control panel.  That is to say, when you pressed the physical panel button it didn't update JMRI's panel with that info.  Naturally the question is - how would it?  the Quad could put it out on the DCC bus but I don't believe that's allowed, and it doesn't use the Loconet.  So I originally thought of using the Tower Controller 64 for this purpose, that and getting sensors on the Loconet as well.  The TC-64 has 64 input/outputs that can send / receive info.  The Quad can put out TTL levels on its expansion pins (one of the reasons I like the Quad so much) that the TC-64 can interpret and then pass that info to JMRI.

So I tested it out, finally.  It worked.  Here's the incredible easy how - and at about $8 bucks per Quad its very inexpensive.

So now I have my JMRI panel switches being updated by the Quads, via the TC-64.  With some fuzzy logic, sensors and this info I can probably figure out what tracks are occupied without sensors everywhere.  I'm using the light sensors from Rob P as mentioned in my past posts.  They're inexpensive and awesome.  Not as polished a product as Tam Valley but, then again, not the same price tag either.

So that's what I've been working on for the past couple weeks!