I changed the layout to adapt to my plans for scenery so the elevated track is gone. I have a grass mat, furrowed fields and scenery accessories on order from eBay and Scenic Express for my Canadian Prairie. The Grain elevator will be painted on a warm day. Still much to do. Dave
Lookin' good! However, in the first photo foreground, the doubletrack and single track straights should be either parallel or at at least a 15 degree angle between each other, per Unitrack sectional geometry. Those two tracks indicate a problem somewhere... Just because Unitrack hooks up and appears to work does not mean it will continue to do so for a long time. Also, the mis-aligned rail joints will eventually cause derailments, etc. Unitrack sells an adjustable length straight track, but they also sell a couple of assortments of short short pieces of track that help solve those kinds of problems. You can piece different combinations of short pieces together to get unique lengths, and then if you wish, later you can trim a longer piece to match the collection of short pieces (or an adjusted, variable length piece.) Always trim longer unitrack sections down by cutting a section out of the middle of the roadbed, then slide the remaining roadbed ends together, and trim the rail lengths at the end. When all is installed and works fine, then remove the cut piece and glue the roadbed ends together from underneath the roadbed. There is a video on Fifer Hobby's website on how to do this. I highly recommend using track planning software to design layouts. I use a free package called XTrackCAD, and like it a lot. It will keep you honest (but it can adjust for mismatches of a small fraction of an inch or so, but nothing like what you have there.)
Dave, can you tell me what this Kato component is? I see it in their catalog, but am uncertain. I'm guessing that you run track power to it and it provides three outlets to distribute it? If that's what it does, it could be a handy and clean way to provide extra feeders for improved reliability on my railroad. Thanks!
That is what it is for. It allows you to join up to 3 sections of feeders to one lead going to the controller. I have 5 of them and it let me clean up the wiring. KAT-24-827 is the part number
To feed the wires through smaller holes in the layout base, I purchased an "E-flite Tamiya Pin Extractor Tool, EFLA215" from Amazon. It allows you to easily remove the pins from the shroud/housing without damage, so you can feed the wires/pins through the layout base and re-insert them into the housing. Just pay attention to which color wire goes into the square vs round shrouds on the connector housings. Also works for Unitrack switch control leads, which use the same connector (so be careful when you are hooking up track and switch controls!)
Thanks for the information about the connector and the pin extractor. They will be helpful. I am taking notes. Rich
Kato makes that pretty easy. Red/Black is turnouts and Blue/white is track power. Pretty easy if you ask me. In my case i have 3 inches of foam and can cut where needed for those multi connectors and run wire the same way. Just drilled a hole and run the plug and wire down through the hole and there ya go.I have a little wire puller to grab the wires at the connectors and it was fast and easy to do it. With the track and ballast there is plenty of room to make the hole big enough for the plugs to go down threw the foam. That was one of the reasons i went with Kato. Super easy. The only place i didn't use Kato was the bridges. Kato hadn't got there new flex track out yet. I used Atlas. Haven't ran any engines on them yet.
The connectors are polarized WRT mating, but not WRT which pin goes in which position of the connector shell, and I'm not worried about mixing red/black with blue/white, but rather swapping red & black or blue and white pins in the same connector, which would cause power shorts (blue/white) or the opposite control of the switch (open/close due to swapping red/black). I'm not too worried about plugging a switch (red/black wires) into a power connector (blue/white wires), but stranger things have happened, especially if I am using a Y cable to control multiple switches from one control.
