The siding track at the GERN facility is now in place from west turnout on. The East turnout will be installed soon.

I really like using the Latex Caulk for gluing down track. Once you lay down a thin layer of the stuff, it’s got good holding strength. It’ll hold down flex track on curves long enough for you to get everything just right before applying some weight for it’s final set-up. A few hours is good.

I also tested out installing a remote tortoise mount. It works pretty well. Trying to line up where to drill under 2″ of foam isn’t easy. As you can see, my drill head pushed down some foam, and even started to melt it. I’ll have to come up with some other way for the other turnouts.

But anyway, the contraption works using telfon tubing and piano to connect the tortoise to a remote actuator, when turns a thicker guide wire through a piece of brass tube. Once I got it installed it worked great. I was super happy and will plan on doing all my other lower level turnouts this way. No more drilling giant holes in the benchwork.

Shaun Previous Layout

This weekend I got my new Digitrax BDL168 installed. The BDL168 is a occupancy detector unit for monitoring 16 blocks. This unit will work in conjunction with the Signal Logic programming for operating signals in the future.

All of my layout electronics will reside in one of my bookshelfs under the layout.

I first started by cutting 22 pieces of 20AWG gauge wire. I had some spools of Atlas’ wire so that’s what I used.

I then soldered all the “feeder” wires to the BDL168’s connector board. There’s 16-block wires, 4 DCC zones, 2 wires for a 12v supply, and 1 for the DCC Ground.

All of these feeders were then connected to some terminal strips. Larger 14AWG wire will run from these terminal strips to various points on the layout for block occupancy monitoring. I used a handheld label printer to print the labels.

Shaun Previous Layout

After searching around for some concrete pillars in n-scale one day, I stumbled across this product from Monroe Models. It looked just like what was wanting, so I ordered a box from Model Train Stuff Featuring Exclusive Model Trains and accessories at Discount Prices, along with the extension set to see how they looked.

UPS dropped them off today and I opened them right up and they’re perfect! All they need is a painting of concrete color and they’ll look even better I bet.

So if you’re ever looking for some modern concrete pillars and/or abutments, check these out.

Shaun Previous Layout

Today I got the first tortoise turnout switch machine installed on the lower level mainline. After putting down some track first using silicon latex, I marked out where the tortoise needed to go, cut out the foam, and then cut a whole in the benchwork for the tortoise.

Then using Liquid Nails projects, I glues in a piece of perf board from Radio Shack, with a channel cut out for the tortoise wire.

Once that setup, I got the track in place, attached a piece of industrial strength velco to the tortoise, exposed the sticky side and then guided it up the hole all lined.

in 24 hours the the sticky velco glue will setup strong and it’s not going anywhere. At least that’s the plan. The velco will enable me to remove the switch machine in case any failures occur.

Shaun Previous Layout