 |
|
||||||||||||||
| Links to Notebook Pages: |
Monday October 30, 2006 5:10 am Lethbridge Sunrise 7:16 Sunset 17:13 Hours of daylight: 9:57
A. Morning Musings
5:10 am It is -10 C at the moment with a high of -5 C forecast.
The ground is snow-covered with little chance of much melting today. Even the road is snow covered so the heat of the asphalt is now sub-zero. There is about 2" on the ground. I will get my first opportunity to shovel the sidewalk and driveway this morning.
I have coffee scheduled for 8:30 am.
Model Trains: My approach to nailing down the track with small nails appears to be working fine. I will try to complete this task for the Outer Mainline track as well as for Distillery Row. I may even try to work on the Coaldale yard. That would give me a complete operational layout for the Outer Mainline and associated towns and industries. This is now proceeding more quickly than I had envisaged. I still want to think about my Inner Mainline routes and the possible reversing loop scenarios. I am not sure I have the best plan from the point of view of wiring.
B. Plan
Immediate Health Walk & exercise 1 hr Model Trains Lay track for Distillery Row 1hr Lay track for Outer Mainline 2 hr Mathematics Read "Fearless Symmetry" chap 7: quadratic reciprocity 1 hr Continue reading "The Equation that Couldn't be Solved" 1 hr History Continue reading "Marie Antoinette" 1 hr Literature Begin reading "The Song of Roland" 1 hr Later Chores Investigate water softeners for home Technology Read manual for cell phone Make notes for chap. 4 of "Switching to the Mac" Begin reading "iPhoto" digital photography - learn about using the various manual settings
Philosophy Read "The Art of Living" by Epictetus Mathematics Larson "Calculus" Read "The Computational Beauty of Nature" Chap 3 Gardner "The Colossal Book of Short Puzzles" History Continue reading "Citizens" Watson "Ideas" Model Trains Build oil refinery diorama: add ground cover Assemble second oil platform kit Assembly of CN 5930, an SD40-2 with a NAFTA logo Puzzles The Orange Puzzle Cube: puzzle #9
C. Actual/Notes
7:00 am I have had another look at my track layout and made a few simple changes to the Mainline routes. The net result is that I now have only one reversing loop and the entire Inner Mainline is simply an extension of the Outer Mainline with no reversing loops. This significantly simplifies the wiring and solves my nagging concern that the previous layout would not work with DCC. I trust my intuition - when something doesn't feel right, it usually isn't right.
The only difference is the removal of two small sections of track near the center of the layout. But the difference is huge in terms of the electrical current characteristics of the layout. Also the original layout design assumed a visual barrier (the green lines) which I have decided not to use.
3:00 PM I have added the foam underbed and nailed down it and the track for the entire Outer Mainline as well as for Distillery Row. The entire left side of the layout is now operational as well as the top and right side Outer Mainline. I can form a train in the Coaldale yard and travel to either Black Diamond or Distillery Row, drop off the appropriate cars, and return to Coaldale. While the locomotive is at Black Diamond or Distillery Row I can move the empty cars to where they may be loaded, and move the loaded cars to a siding where they may be picked up and taken to Coaldale. Once in the Coaldale classification yard the cars can be re-sorted to form a new train that will take the loaded cars to their ultimate destination. So far, this seems to be working quite well.
7:30 PM I have cleaned off one more boxcar, CN 445531, a 40' steel boxcar with dreadnaught ends and a Manitoba bison on the side.
The 200 Ton Crane was purchased in Calgary last week and is now on the layout as it was ready out-of-the-box.
Here are a few photos taken this afternoon:
D. Reflection