Power District 2

So, following up on the last post, it took 3 evenings of work to complete the rewiring for power district 2, not just 1 evening as I'd hoped.

Although I reused the feeder wires that were already in place everything else was installed from scratch: power bus, terminals, labels, soldered connections, and even two sets of new feeder wires. It was interesting and a bit nostalgic going over wiring that I'd installed nearly 4 years ago when I started on this layout. At the time, in my innocence, I'd used terminals that were 4-6 feet apart and as such had 22 gauge feeder wires that were commonly longer than three feet and occasionally as long as 6 feet. I've since learned that this just won't do -- the maximum lenght of thin feeder wire should be about 2', assuming you have a connection to each rail, and ideally less than that. Power District 2 now meets that ideal.

I'll need to post a map of the power districts at some point. Power Districts 2 and 3 overlap, both covering the lower peninsula and west wall, and slightly encroaching into the north wall. 2 includes the SAMR double tracked main, the interchange yard, the track that connects the SAMR to staging, and the one Union Station approach that is not an auto-reverse district. Power District 3 includes the BNSF double tracked main and the commuter train yard, plus the track that connects this line to staging.

As I've worked through this I've accepted that Power District 1, which covers all three tiers of lower staging, is way too large. I have added a project to my to-do list to convert the middle tier to it's own power district.

I've also had a good conversation with someone from the Digitrax user group who suggests that the PM42, which I'm using for AR, performs acceptably as a power district manager but not for AR. The problem is that it is too slow to react to shorts to be an effective AR. Now, I'm using N, while he is using HO, but I've seen similar comments before. I think that I'll order a PSXR to replace the PM42 on the AR function, but then reprogram the PM42 for 4 power districts. This will need to be done fairly soon as I hope to soon have more power districts on line.

So, what to do next? I still have the same goal stated in the last post, regarding fully automated switching functionality for the SAMR line by end of next weekend. I think I'll try to set up the DS64 circuit. This means establishing the standards for numbering of DS64s, and wiring them for power and Loconet, then setting up two of them (the second one is en route now). After that I'll have the power setup in place for me to test Tortoises as I install and tune them. If all goes well I'll have DS64s in place and two Tortoises working smoothly by end of the weekend.