Wiring, automation and general putzing

Well a little more progress as the module for the train show is finished (ok acceptable for now, I'll keep adding more details). Took Monday off work this week as a birthday present to me and spent some time on the layout.

Wired up the BDL168 detector board. This was not as difficult as I was expecting. You first have to solder wires to the 44 pin header. I ran these wires to terminal strips and attached the whole thing to a piece of 1/4" plywood. This was attached under the layout with a hinge so it's easy to work on, but can fold up out of the way when not needed. Attached feeders from the few sections of track laid and powered up the detector section. Only had 1 set of feeders miswired and that was quickly fixed. The detector sections checked out ok with digitrax's little testing device, so I hooked up the computer and fired up TrainController (TC). Sure enough the connections worked. Put my BR 103 on the tracks, played around with TC and in no time had the engine shuttling back and forth automatically under computer control - this is definitely going to be great when more of the layout is running.

Also played around with track layout for temporary staging. I'm going to hook up the two lines leaving Enkenbach (for Kaiserslautern and Hochspeyer) with a return loop and 3 staging tracks. This will fit fine on a 4ft x 3 ft module that I can move around as the layout grows. With push-pull trains and the railcars, 3 staging sections should support the operations on KBS 650 just fine.

Hopefully I can get some more track layed and wired this week and weekend. Jennie's folks are coming up to visit and my nephew Conor will also be in town for the train show. I'd like to be able to run some trains for them when they visit. If I do get some done, I'll try get some pics uploaded.