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.

Operations and paperwork

One aspect of model railroading I've always been interested in is operations. Every since reading Bruce Chubb's "How to OPERATE your model railroad" in high school, I've been fascinated with creating time tables and waybills for my model layouts. BD Kaiserslautern is no exception. Having several actual DB timetables has help me create a few for the layout. I've also gotten good ideas on operations from the FREMO site and more recently ideas from Werner Falkenbach's website on Schmalspurbahnen (especially the section Fahrbetrieb).

One advantage of creating paperwork and timetables is I don't have to be at the layout to work on trains! Working on timetables or train compositions during lunch makes a nice break from work.
Most of the work is still in progress and pretty rough at this point. But feel free to take a look at my most recent timetable and the Bahnhofsordnung for Enkenbach (they are in PDF form)

As always comments are welcome, so if you notice anything that can be done better (or more accurate) please let me know.

Other projects

More layout progress has been on temporary hold as I've been working on my module for the CNY-ETE layout. We will be showing this publicly for the first time at the Central New York Model Train Fair on November 3-4th, so my modeling time has been spent getting things ready. We had a trial run this past Saturday and were able to get everything hooked up and trains running! Scenery and detail work still have some ways to go. If you are in the area, please stop by the show and say hi!

A few photos to share the work.