Wiring

Monday this week my two Soundtraxx decoders arrived.  So the first two nights this week while watching TV, I installed the decoder into 4468.  To do this I removed the circuit board from the loco and replaced the bulbs with LEDs.  I hard-wired the decoder.  I also made a speaker enclosure out of 1mm styrene.  The loco ran and sounded quite nice.  The next two nights I installed the decoder into 44100.  This time, I kept the bulbs, but still removed the circuit board, hard wired the decoder and also build anoterh speaker enclosure.

For weeks I have again been contemplating how to install my point motor control panel for Acacia Ridge Yard.  Saturday I finally mounted my two Digitrax DS-64 points controllers on the layout.  Today I drew up the track diagram on a piece of board and mounted the 9 push buttons for each of the 9 routes.  I have yet to permanently mount the control panel on the layout and connect the DS-64's to the track bus.  Another job for later this week.  This is the easy bit, as I will then have to work out how to program these DS-64's so they can be controlled from the Pro-Cab handsets as well as directly from the control panel.

The facia at Acacia Ridge Yard on the top level showing the control panel and the points controllers

In between all this I installed the next lot of KD's on my Lima IP cars, so now I have about 12 cars able to be run.  Late this afternoon, I touched up two NOCY's I had scratchbuilt with brown and black spray paint.  The brown wagon also received a pair of bogies I had lying around - not 2CM, but they will do for the time being.

Today I also fitted extra pickups to two Lima XPT power cars.  They need fine tuning of their CV's as they start at different speed settings and aren't good slow runners.  I will leave this to either tomorrow or Wednesday this week as I have these days off work.  Wednesday is my son's first day at school, so I will take the opportunity to also attend.  The first week is only half days, but we also have an appointment on the Wednesday afternoon to see the teacher, so its best to get this all out of the way early.

Little by little jobs get done and the layout gets more usable.  Still about 10 years to go!

Tuesday is Tuesday Nighters at my place.  So hopefully we will get about 8 or maybe more turn up.