Model Railway
a. Layout
Building
Design
DCC
b. Locomotives
c. Cars
d. Operating
e. Summaries
Photos
Model Railway: Design of Layout (2/3)
(Track Layout)
I have just returned from a quick trip to the Model Baron hobby store where I bought some packages of short track sections. This should enable me to complete laying the track for the Coaldale Yard. The first step will be to finalize and nail down the mainline track for that area. ...
I have the mainline track nailed down near the Coaldale Yard. I have tried a number of combinations of switches and track as one enters the yard and have finally come up with a combination that gives me an extra classification track. Now to take a break and then re-look at it again before nailing it down. ...
This continues to look good. I now have all the track in place in the Coaldale Yard and am pleased with the result. I have drilled holes in the surface for the wiring for the switches and have cleaned up the mess in the Yard. I then tested a locomotive to confirm that there were no shorts in the ciruitry. Everything is working. I still have lots of work to do to wire the switches to a control panel but the Yard is basically functional as long as I move the switches manually.
I have relaid the track for the mainline loop around the outside of the layout. ...
While cleaning the track I happened to notice that one switch in the Yard was wired incorrectly (i.e. straight through and turn were set for the red and green buttons on the side control panel instead of vice-versa) and I corrected that.
I finally got around to cleaning ALL of the track in the Coaldale Yard. I then began running diesel switcher CN 7984, an S4 switcher on the track to see if there were any problems.
Photo from database
Here are 3 photos that I took while running CN 7985 in the Coaldale Yard:
The short answer is yes, there was a problem. But not the kind I was expecting. The unit traversed a number of tracks without any problems but then it suddenly simply stopped and shut down. That caught me off guard. Why?
It took me a few minutes to realize that when I finalized the track layout in the Yard a few months ago I made a couple of "minor" changes as I realized that the tracks were too close together. One of these changes involved setting up an end-around capability so a locomotive could come into a section of the Yard nose first, drop off the cars, and then switch over to an adjoining track and reverse out of the section. Great idea.
But, I now realize, this also created a reversing loop situation. As a result the locomotive totally shorted out as soon as it entered this part of the layout.
However there is also good news. I had an extra "reversing loop module" (a small electronic component that could sense a possible short and change the polarity of the section in a fraction of a second) as a result of changing my layout in a different part of the layout. I doubted that I would ever use this module - now I need it. I will install this during my next session.