Visio wiring diagrams

So the past few days have been very busy both with work and with a home project. I have kept up with my promise to "do a little bit each day on the layout", but unfortunately this week the stress is on the word "little". I did make a tiny bit of progress on building more staging subroadbed, and have spent an hour or two with the nice package of DS64, Tortoises, and the LocoBuffer that arrived mid week. I'm starting to practice with these components so that I can understand their innerworkings, and when I do I'll post on that topic.

The other bit of progress was starting work on the staging Visio diagrams. Here are a couple of screenshots that show how these will look. First, this is the diagram of the lower tier of staging, near the loop:


Here is the "Key" section of the diagram, showing what the various symbols mean:


Hopefully this is self-explanatory to those who have read the wiring standards posts. It may also help to go back to a picture of this section of layout, before the bridges were put in, to see the track in situ and compare it to this diagram.

The purpose of the Visio is to help with maintenance and changes later on. Yes, the wiring follows standards and labeling conventions, but the Visio shows how it all hangs together. If you've ever tried to sort out complex wiring that you built months or years before without a diagram or labels, you'll understand how helpful such a diagram can be.

The Visio does take some time to set up, but once in place adding new track to the diagram isn't that time consuming. I find it best to write down the track data on a notepad when I'm working on the layout. Later, when I have access to a PC but not the layout, I can still "work" on the layout by transferring the notepad data to Visio.