It’ll be about 43″ wide and powered by a CML electronics DTM30 board.

Bus Wiring

All DCC block bus wires and feeders have been run, soldered, and connected.  The last bus to run is the general “Rail A” bus for my industry spurs. Here’s a look at my track diagram from Train Controller and my Block numbering.  I’ll eventually incorporate the info the diagram.

Fascia

With the bus wiring pretty much done I began installing some of the fascia to the layout.  Need to purchase one more 2×4 sheet of hardboard to finish the end of the island.  Everything still needs profiles cut, gaps filled, and some sanding.

I’ve also got the board cut to the correct width for staging parts of the layout but I’m going to install some LED bar lights first to light it up when needed and also need to add openings for access into staging in the fascia.  That should work should happen this coming week.

Wiring

A look at the 1/8″ jack on the fascia panel used for powering one of the bridge spans. This is the upper deck span.

Scenery

Using foam, I began constructing the hill that’ll cover the long staging lead running on the back of the layout.  It’s basically just strips of foam built like stairs.  They’re not permanently installed, just sitting there.  They’ll be setup so they will be removable just in case access to that track is needed.

Signals

With block wiring done I dug out the box of signal this afternoon. I can only setup 8 signal heads so far with 1 SIGM20 board so the Dixie Curve passing siding will be the first to light up.  I’ll be using two signal bridges and 2 double-target searchlights here.

And that’s all for now!

With the speaker installed like it is now, this sucker is loud on the bench.  Still will use the speaker system though as it helps gives a cleaner, deeper sound.

I’m playing around with downloading sound projects to load up on it, so I’ll get a video down once I’m done playing with my new toy.

The result? A nice little explosion in my face, sparks and all.

Maybe the box just wanted a better sound decoder.

The two boards on the left are the DAC10 boards and control 16 tortoise turnouts by DCC.  The (soon to be) 3 boards on the right are the SIGM20 Signal controller boards.  Each SIGM20 can control 8 signals with 3 aspects each.

And work on the last bit of track is underway.

In the mean time, I also began working on wiring up the turnout and signal DCC boards to a new piece of plywood that will get mounted under the layout. Here’s a look at the 2 CML Electronics DAC10 turnout controller boards.

3 CML SIGM20 Signal Controller boards (2 of which still need to be ordered) will also be mounted to the other side of the board.  I needed to order a couple more of the dual RJ11 surface mount boxes.  Once I get what I have wired up, I’ll install the board to start installing turnout  motors and signals where I can until the additional BDL168 and Signal boards are purchased.

So at the beginning of the week I started to do a little cleanup on my layout wiring.  When I first ran the wiring for the servo turnouts and control panel, I ran the wire along with the bus wire.  I then had the thought that if/when I need to move this layout, having to remove all that wire (plus signal and more turnout wiring) would be a pain.  So I decided to pull it all out, bundle it in some split loom and run under the layout attached to the legs.  This way the whole bundle of wire can easily come off the layout by cutting some zip-ties.  Just some little prep-work for the future.

I also decided to relocate the BDL168 board and command station to a new location under the island.  The location I originally had these ended up not being very accessible and the wiring started to get messy. Now everything is nice and tidy.  I left room for a 2nd BDL168 board to be installed in the near future.  Turnout and signal hardware will mount under the island in similiar fashion as well.

The black bundle you see is the LED Occupancy wire running to the control panel. It connects to the 4 tan phone jack boxes, which are wired to the the BDL168 via the rainbow ribbon cable.

Once my re-wiring project was done, it was time to get back to the track.

I started to laying down the roadbed for the island this weekend, the first bit of viewable mainline to go down.  I wanted my mainline on the island to have a high ballast profile and have some height difference from the siding, so I doubled up on the cork roadbed.

I use Midwest Cork for my roadbed. It comes in a strip you need to pull apart to get your two halves, so you always end up with one piece having a nice profile and one piece almost square (until you sand off the extra bits).

So what I did for the mainline was use all the nicely profiled edges for the bottom layer and the ugly squarish piece for the upper layer because it’s gonna get trimmed.  I then laid out my track, traced the tie edge on the cork, and then used a carpet cutter to trim the cork using the bottom layer as kind of a guide.

And here’s a view showing the height difference between the mainline and the siding.

Once the roadbed was down, I started adding the super-elevation using the masking tape method.

Still to need to clean the rails at the solder points and some dried caulking at spots, but the engine ran great on the track that had power.  The control panel occupancy lights worked great too.  I’m going on vacation next week but I’ll probably place an order mid-week for more suitcase connectors so they’ll arrive just after I get home.

Speaking of bus wires, here’s what I’m doing for my bus connections between modules.

These are Anderson PowerPole connectors.  I really like these for two reasons:

1) They are genderless.  So there’s no worrying about needing to have a female and male to make a connection (cause I know I always ended up with more of one than the other somehow). If you got 2 connectors, your good!  Just crimp down, flip on over and connect.

2) They are interlocking.  Each connector can slide into a grove on another, so you can easily build block connectors of several wires.  Need to add another wire? No problem, just slide it on any existing connector to add it to the block.

So what to do the rest of the week?  I’m working on the mainline on the peninsula right now.  Sub-roadbed plywood is mounted in place.  In the process of laying out track for the rough-in, then I’ll install the risers for the track, cork roadbed, and finally track.

I originally planed on placing the paper mill here on the peninsula, but I’m leaning towards simply having this be an hillside scene or something because the track is all on a grade here.  So we’ll see.