Long story, short: While working on my sound box, a loose wire touched a spot on the decoder it shouldn’t have touched.

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

Maybe the box just wanted a better sound decoder.

Shaun DCC

Phase 1 of the new Turnout/Signal wiring panel is done.  Phase 2 will be adding the last 2 SIGM20 boards in the future.  The wire terminals on the DAC10 boards are small, so switching between regular DCC and programming track wires was a pain in the past. So this time I added some toggle switches in case I need to adjust any settings.

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.

Shaun DCC, Track

This weekend I got under the layout to run a couple DCC block bus wires and feeders.  I filled up the last of the open spots on my BDL168 board so any further DCC bus work will have to wait until next month when I have a new BDL168 purchase budgeted.

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.

Shaun DCC

Ok, no bears.

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.

Shaun DCC, Track