In the year 2525

The title has absolutely zero relevance to anything, except that today I snapped the 2,525th picture on the digital camera I got in 2005 and it reminded me of the song from long ago.

The real purpose of this post is to provide an update on the progress regardingthe goals for the weekend. Item number 5 was resolved, per the last post, and yesterday and today I dealt with items 2 and 3. Item 2 is completely done -- the power cabinet rewiring and organizing is complete, the Digitrax panels are in place, and I've even fixed the incorrect Loconet cables in the staging area. I'll cover this in a new post on the Wiring Standards theme, either today or tomorrow.

The cabinet and wiring work took many, many hours (6? 8?). A lot had to be changed and I wanted the final result to be as "done" as it can be given that there are still some unknowns about the remainder of the layout. My son has observed that there are certain "fun" activities in model railroading that he loves to participate in, starting with running trains but also including repairing rolling stock. Other tasks, he observes, like construction, are not as fun. The power cabinet task was definitely in the "not fun" category, but now that it's over I'm very glad it's done, and it will make future operations and maintenance much easier. The best part was that everything worked the first time I tested it, even the middle tier AR section. Sometimes -- rarely -- things happen that way.

I've also cleaned the remainder of the middle tier staging track so that I can store rolling stock, part of task 3. In order to complete task 3 I have to bring out the CMX cleaning car and start the weekly track cleaning process. I hope to do that tomorrow.

Here are a couple of pictures from today. The first can be titled "Earthquake!" as it shows the staging area after I put a bunch of staples in underneath to hold in the loconet wire. Each staple really shook the cars on the layout:


The second pictures shows the staging area after all other work was done. You see cars are now organized on the middle tier and, if you look closely, you'll see the Digitrax throttle panels now installed on the front of the layout.


My next task is item (1) from that earlier post.