Between all the holiday hoopla from Thanksgiving and to upcoming Christmas and a week long vacation, I managed to get in the garage a couple times since my last post to work on the staging yard. Happy to report the staging yard was completed today. All tracks are bus wired, occupancy detection and switch control is fully operational on the control panel, and the track has been cleaned and "No-Ox'd". Woohoo! Next up is to install the feeders and bus wire for staging lead on the other side of the room that I installed about 1 months ago.
That yard looks beautiful.. and I mean that to the fullest extent! I'm so jealous of your available space!
Spent last night dropping feeders and running bus wire to the staging lead so it's now operational. I then broke some rolling stock and began running a few trains to see how it all worked. Here's an double stack pulling out of Yard Track 1 onto the bridge and then making it's way up the incline on the staging lead. So far everything has been running on the trackwork great except my autoracks. But I've always had problems with the racks derailing for no apparent reason since my first layout. It's like they are my "problem child" of the layout. So I need to do a little pinpointing on the track to see if there's anything in particular causing problems. Everything else though (coal cars, double stacks, amtrak cars, hopper train, etc...) ran great throughout the yard and lead. Next up I need to tidy the island and install the upper deck for the staging lead so I get the final staging turnout installed and connected to the wire panel. You can see the staging lead track and very top right of the photo, running off the currently installed upper deck below. You can also see the foam incline right in the middle there that'll bring trains between levels.
Thought I would show an example of the upper level sitting on top of staging. Grabbed a scrap piece of ply and tossed it on the risers. There's about 2.5" of clearance between levels, give or take. So plenty of rooms for tall double stacks and autoracks. For access, I may simply leave long, narrow cutouts in the fascia. Big enough for my hand to reach in but small enough to not be very noticeable.
At the beginning of the week I started to do a little cleanup on my layout wiring. When I first ran the wiring for the servo turnouts and control panel, I ran the wire along with the bus wire. I then had the thought that if/when I need to move this layout, having to remove all that wire (plus signal and more turnout wiring) would be a pain. So I decided to pull it all out, bundle it in some split loom and run under the layout attached to the legs. This way the whole bundle of wire can easily come off the layout by cutting some zip-ties. Just some little prep-work for the future. I also decided to relocate the BDL168 board and command station to a new location under the island. The location I originally had these ended up not being very accessible and the wiring started to get messy. Now everything is nice and tidy. I left room for a 2nd BDL168 board to be installed in the near future. Turnout and signal hardware will mount under the island in similiar fashion as well. The black bundle you see is the LED Occupancy wire running to the control panel. It connects to the 4 tan phone jack boxes, which are wired to the the BDL168 via the rainbow ribbon cable.
Once my re-wiring project was done, it was time to get back to the track. I started to laying down the roadbed for the island this weekend, the first bit of viewable mainline to go down. I wanted my mainline on the island to have a high ballast profile and have some height difference from the siding, so I doubled up on the cork roadbed. I use Midwest Cork for my roadbed. It comes in a strip you need to pull apart to get your two halves, so you always end up with one piece having a nice profile and one piece almost square (until you sand off the extra bits). So what I did for the mainline was use all the nicely profiled edges for the bottom layer and the ugly squarish piece for the upper layer because it's gonna get trimmed. I then laid out my track, traced the tie edge on the cork, and then used a carpet cutter to trim the cork using the bottom layer as kind of a guide. And here's a view showing the height difference between the mainline and the siding. Once the roadbed was down, I started adding the super-elevation using the masking tape method.
Love the updates and your progress looks great! Wiring is my biggest worry on my layout, just seems very intimidating.
Looking good!!!! I have been working on setting up my layout (and making some modifications to get it to fit my new home) over the holidays as well.
A little video showing a Double Stack Train run the mainline on the temporary loop that's in place to help test staging. Temporary Loop Testing on Vimeo
Very nice indeed. I like the use of the channel for the bridge to staging. Is that a lift-out or swing bridge? Looks like some tight clearance in the staging there. Will you have access in case of derailments? -Gary
Thanks! It's a lift-out bridge. Works great using the aluminum channel. There will be 2nd for the upper deck eventually. The clearance is pretty tight. Just under 3". In case of a derailment, non-problem trains can be moved out of there and there's enough space for my to reach a hand to remove cars. I've been running trains in and out staging for a few weeks now and have had 0 problems. So I'm hoping that trend continues
With all but one small section of the upper deck installed, I started laying out the mainline. I'm currently trying out a few different ideas on placement of industry buildings. Shuffling a few things around to accommodate clearances for turnouts (lower deck, cross beams, etc..). I also decided I wanted to re-use my double track truss from the old layout. Instead of water underneath, I think I'm going to model a small roadway under it, but make it look like it may have been an old right-of-way with an old boarded up tunnel or something. Just an idea to try out for something different.
Got tired of the brown masonite backdrop so this past weekend I decided to paint. Put up a couple clouds on one side, while the other will probably be mostly covered by scenery (To hide the staging track).
