The trains they are a-runnin'

Yep, the goal of getting trains running again on Saturday was met. Here is my daughter Laura at the controls of the new Bachmann DDA40X on the layout:



Lots of things, mostly little tasks, had to be done to get to this stage. The final feeder wires were connected last night. Today I got the power cabinet in place with new rollers (more on that in a later post) and ran the remainder of the Auto Reverse (AR) busses from the staging to the cabinet. All the power components, including the PM42 AR device, had been mothballed when I tore down the old staging in December, 2008, and were put up again in the power cabinet. The wiring is still considered temporary, as I want to operate for a bit before I decide the final arrangement of components in the power cabinet. I also had a few leftover wiring and track issues to take care of.

Then I cleaned the track and began running my most reliable DCC engines. The loop from the upper tier staging to lower tier staging and back is just under 190', or about 6 scale miles. There are a small number of track tuning issues I encountered, but far fewer than expected. The AR sections worked perfectly, as did all but one of the Atlas switches.

Over the next weeks I'll run more trains, adding cars and introducing more locomotives from my roster, and fix any track or rolling stock issues as I go.

Meanwhile, I have a host of other projects to start work on. One key one is to finish up the power cabinet. I probably want to add a couple shelves and make the wiring more permanent. I also want to order something for power district circuit breaking, and separate PD-1 (the lower staging) from the rest of the layout. I also need to reinstall the Digitrax ports along the front of the staging, where they used to be with the old staging, and fix some old bugs with the Loconet bus. In other words, there is still alot of general electrical work to do.

Another project is to start automating the switches. Another is to start building the track that will connect the middle tier staging to the layout. And somewhere in all that I want to start adding scenery.

So I'm not sure what to do next. But with trains running while I work, whatever I choose to do next will be even more fun.