Weekend Update

Here's a picture of the layout as of Sunday evening:


The whole of the upper tier now has the blue roadbed in place and track has been laid up until where the north side switch ladder will be. The track has not had the feeder wires connected yet (all those black wires seemingly randomly placed above the layout are feeder wires that are connected to the track but not to the terminals).

In addition, you can't see it but in the past week I also: desoldered a bunch of the switches that were left over from the previous staging attempt; did some wiring work near/on the upper tier bridge (the feeder wires to the bridge track are now reached by disconnects to facilitate removing the bridge for maintenance); set up the Visio diagram for the upper tier; and began wiring the remaining switches on the south end of staging.

All in all, it was a good 4-5 hours work in the past week on the layout. Not as much as I'd like, but still making progress.

Nothing in the past week was particularly challenging -- just application of tried-and-true layout building techniques. My next step is to complete the wiring of this new track (including the south side switch machines), then clean and test it. Once that is done I'll finish up with the rest of the upper tier track.

I've begun shopping for the power cabinet components. That seems like a project that I may tackle before completing the middle and lower tiers of staging.