Bridge work interrupted

Before laying the bridge track all that I'd planned to do was to vaccuum up the area and hand-clean the lower tracks one more time before putting the bridge back in place. But, once I started to do that I realized there were two projects, one small and one large, that needed completion before I put the bridge in place semi-permanently.

The small project involved putting scotch tape around the wire labels, some of which are already showing signs of non-stickiness. These labels have already proven helpful in tracing wiring for one reason or another, and I don't want them to fall off a year or so from now, forcing me to hand trace the wires to see where they go.

The big project is to connect/automate the remote switch machines. My practice to date has been to switch manually, with the idea of adding remote switching later. However, the upper tier bridge will block hand access to most of the switches underneath, so we'll need to have remote control of those switches now.

I have a vague idea that I'd like all layout switches to be remote controlled from 3 places: a computer, a DCC throttle, and a front panel. This is to provide maximum flexibility of operations. Doing some research it appears this is going to be quite a challenge, for reasons I'll explain in a later post. And expensive. And it's going to take some time to think this through before I'm ready to test out a proposed solution for remote switching.

So, for now I'm going to set up a temporary switch board for the south end of staging -- the north end will be able to follow the manual switching practice as those switches will still be accessible. The temporary switch board solution will combine stuff I'll have to do anyway, such as extending the wires to the switch machines, with stuff that is temporary but doesn't require buying anything I don't already have, such as using the "push button" switch controls that come with the Atlas code 80 switches.

I started this project Sunday. All switch machines were tested before installation, so I didn't expect any problems. So, naturally, I ran into a problem with the first switch machine, then proceeded to destroy it by pulling too hard on the wire while trying to fix the problem. Argh. Oh well, replacement switch machines are cheap and I'll probably need to keep 4 in stock (2 for left switch, 2 for right) as normal practice anyway. For now, I've simply grabbed a replacement machine from another switch.

I'd like to complete this Monday, but there are 12 machines to strip wire, add connectors, run and staple wire, add labels, test, adjust, etc. Maybe I can get a kid to help out with this ....