Work continues on the railroad today.
I was on vacation the first half of the month, but before I left I managed to get the last piece of track down on the Nodaway Valley (standard gauge portion) Railroad. All of the track work, turnouts and Tortoise switch machines are installed and tested. All that is left before scenery can be applied is wiring.
My goal today is to get all the common rail wiring complete, then get the block rails wired to terminal blocks. After that I'll have to build control panels so that the block rails can be wired to block switches and the Tortoise switch machines can be connected to their control switches. My plan is to be able to switch control systems from DC to DCC, the same as I could do on the last layout.
I am using Digitrax DCC on this layout because I have it, and if I program my locos on the Digitrax they will run the same at home as they do on the club layouts. I have a Cooler Crawler kit to put together that I will use for DC power. Along with the kit are throttles, and if I am seeing things correctly at least one of them is a radio throttle. I guess I will see when I build the circuit.
Once I can get the wiring complete I will run some trains for a while to verify everything is working the way I want it to, and then I will start on the narrow gauge Path Valley Railroad. I have turnouts to build and control systems to figure out. I want to use servos for the turnouts, controlled by Arduinos, so that I can set up an automatic continuous operations loop for when I want to run locomotives for break-in or just to run them around like fish in a bowl.
That will take some figuring out because what I will have is a loop-to-loop on the Scenic Ridge layout with a branch line to the coal processing plant and dual gauge interchange. I want to be able to control them all individually for normal operations or switch to the automatic operation on the loop-to-loop and lock the branch line out for continuous operation.
And now the plans have been made, I need to get started.
