Cam came over early this afternoon to help on some more progress on the benchwork for the layout. Primarily woodwork surrounding the shelf brackets on the end-wall where ICG in Nanaimo, the Trent river bridge, and the entry into Port Alberni.
And with that work, I’m now pretty much out of my 2″ strips of 3/4″ plywood. Now I really am needing virtually everything!
So I’ve been stuck for quite a while in the benchwork department, and today, we’ve made pretty decent progress!
After checking out the offerings from Rona, Lowes and Home Depot, Cam and I settled on 70″ tall white Rubbermaid dual track standards, bought 8 of them, and a couple boxes of 11.5″ brackets (32).
After a spot of lunch, Dan came over to help with the fun of installing the standards with Cam and I. Numerous screws secured the standards into the wall and we now have the ability to carry track boards half way to Courtenay, well into the Nanaimo switching zone and halfway into the Port Alberni Yard. Now I just need more of virtually everything. 🙂
Saturday, went down to see Bruce (The Dispatcher) to pick up the first of the circuit breakers for the layout, a DCC Specialties PSX-4. Lots of good reviews for this and the unit will certainly help keep the bulk of the layout running when derailments and switches being run through short out the district.
Cam came over and we worked on getting things at the Booster Shelf cleaned up and sorted out to get the circuit breaker installed. Owing to the PSX-4’s rather large size, we had to build a secondary shelf to hold the power supplies for the boosters, and that allowed lots of things to be organized.
I’ll be ordering a couple PSX-3’s to subdivide the outputs from the other two boosters shortly, and here’s how the sub-districts will work out:
| Output | 1 | 2 | 3 |
| A | Parksville | Port Alberni | Upper Helix |
| B | Bryn | Arrowsmith | Lower Helix |
| C | Courtenay | Nanaimo | Staging Yard |
| D | Mud Bay | N/A | N/A |
Here’s a picture of how it’s set up for the moment. The blue wall immediately to the right of the green circuit board (PSX-4) is where the PSX-3’s will go. Starting to look somewhat organized! Too bad I didn’t think to take a picture before we started on all this… Oh well, hindsight is 20/20, right?
Happy Canada Day!
A little belated to be sure, but I was offline (aka camping in an area without cell coverage) for the bulk of the weekend.
Came home last night festooned with mosquito bites and a few sunburnt areas and the cool basement was calling out to me. Naturally, I heeded the call, went downstairs and built a couple bullfrogs, spiked down about nine feet of track (the remainder of the main and siding at Arrowsmith) and put a few spikes into the turnout at the west end of the Arrowsmith siding. I also installed and tested the bullfrogs.
Cam called early this afternoon, said he had taken a couple days off work so he could not be at work on his birthday (the 26th, happy birthday!).
Asked what I was up to, I replied that I was making dinner and then headed downstairs to do some work on the layout and invited him over to take in the fun. So he did.
We pulled rolling stock out of Parksville and sanded the cork to the MP25 trestle location and then proceeded to fit track for the remainder of the Arrowsmith storage track and a few feet beyond. The other switch was also put into place.
We would’ve spiked it down and soldered various bits but it was getting late by then and I called it a night.
I’ll get the track spiked down sometime next week and wire up the track to a yet-to-be-installed bus but I’m definitely needing to find some dough to enable some more purchases… Specifically track, cork, benchwork material, and of course those shelf brackets!
At least in the meantime I can run a train to Arrowsmith…
Didn’t do much over the course of the weekend than acquire some Peco rail joiners on Saturday, and try to apply some firmware updates to the DT402D throttle and the UR92. The former was successful, the latter…. Well, let’s say the upgrade downgraded the functionality to nil.
A message has been sent to Digitrax and I’ll hopefully find out soon whether I’m sending it on a vacation to Florida. I suppose it’s not a really bad thing as I’ve still got a couple throttles to send down for repair/upgrading…and I should get some more trackwork going too.
Fitted and spiked down two 3′ long sticks of Flex last night… One for the siding and one for the main connected to the east siding switch at Arrowsmith.
Debated whether I sand the cork to enable more track to be laid and decided to do that another time.
I debated on whether I should even post a note about this, and ended up deciding to go ahead.
Last night, after considerable searching for rail joiners, spiked down the east siding switch for Arrowsmith. I also got a couple lengths of flex prepared for spiking down.
That is all.
And there ya have it. After a very lengthy wait, we finally have a train at the current end of track – the east siding switch of Arrowsmith. The train of course made it up the hill under its own power, and made obvious the need to fully check the trip pins on the cars I’m running. A couple candidates are those which derailed on the way up on account of the screws holding the track down.
By the way, this is the first train to run on the layout in many months… So happy to hear those units once again.
Spent a little bit of time in the basement last night, working on finishing feeders and busses in the helix. Got the upper helix red wire completed, strung the black (and found that length of wire is about 4″ too short…) and finished off all the feeders to both track and their ready-rod connections.
During all this, I’ve got one of my older iPods playing music. One song came on that I didn’t care to hear, so out I went to remedy the situation. I stood up a little too early…
Ow. Ow. Ow.
The bridge from Parksville to the lower deck had (emphasis on had) a UP5 mounted to the bottom of it, screwed in on the top pair of holes. I had stood up right into this poor piece of aluminum, bent the living daylights out of it, and in return it fought back, tearing a very loved shirt (obtainable only at the Apple company store at their worldwide headquarters in Cupertino, CA) and putting a couple good gashes into my back.
I’m now seriously contemplating a decision to go completely wireless for the throttles…
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