The Sky is Blue

The walls (and ceiling) behind the layout are now blue. Yes, it would have been easier to do this prior to building the layout, but at this stage it still wasn't a big deal to slide it out of the way. The color is Benjamin Moore Caribbean Mist. For now I decided not to paint the wall with the doorway that is perpendicular to the layout, but I might change my mind about that later. I also need to make some kind of cover for the thermostat. A freight car box with one end cut off fits nicely over it, but I think something more rounded would look better.

I took some of the buildings from my old layout out of storage and put them on the new layout. The row of storefronts will be continuous, so I will need a few more to fill the gap.

Layout Update - January 2020

So it's been quite a while (exactly 4 months, in fact) since I last posted anything on this blog. Luckily the reason why is good news - I've just been busy with layout construction and life in general. My informal goal had been to get the first phase of the layout up and running by the end of 2019. I made it - just barely - and ran the first train on December 31.

A consist of home road equipment makes the first lap.

I spent the last few months of 2019 laying track and wiring the layout. I did all of this prior to attaching the legs to the tabletop. Being able to rotate the layout on the floor and tip it up on one side to access the underside made the tracklaying and especially the wiring and switch machine installation much easier. The layout is currently wired for DC control using an MRC Tech 4 power pack reused from my old layout. The added complexity and expense of DCC does not seem worth it to me for a small layout like this where only 1 train with 1 locomotive will be running at a time. I'm intrigued by some of recent developments in wireless locomotive control (e.g., LocoFi, RailPro, etc.), and down the road I might switch to one of those systems. The layout is wired as a single block (with many feeders) but I equipped two of the spurs with on/off switches to be able to park locomotives on them.

I connected groups of feeder wires together under the layout with Wago 221 lever nuts as shown below. I learned about these from reading Model Railroad Hobbyist magazine, and I highly recommend them for ease of use.

The first phase of the layout has 5 turnouts. Three of them - the ones around the outer loop - are controlled with Caboose Industries 204S switch stands. I like how these look but they seem a bit delicate. We'll have to see how they hold up over time. I put temporary paper targets on the switch stands for now but will replace those at some point with painted plastic or brass targets. I reversed the throw bars on two of these turnouts so that the switch stands wouldn't be right on the edge of the layout and therefore more vulnerable to damage.

The other two turnouts - the one in the middle of the layout and the wye that leads to the future interchange track - are controlled by Tortoise switch motors. The turnout in the middle is an awkward reach to access from either side, so a powered switch machine made a lot of sense here. The wye, on the other hand, is on the edge of the layout and easily accessible, but the interchange track will be a reversing section and I wanted to automate it with switch machine contacts. The wye is actually too close to the edge of the layout for a normal Tortoise mounting. I pondered this one for quite a while and even started building a custom linkage until a very simple and obvious solution finally occurred to me: reverse the turnout throwbar and run the Tortoise wire through the hole at the end of the throwbar instead of the hole centered between the rails. This allowed me to offset the Tortoise to the side so that the 1x4 frame would no longer be in the way.

Top view of offset Tortoise mount.

The image below shows the underside of the middle section of the layout where all the wiring comes together. The blue box is the power pack from my first train set - it works great to power the Tortoises. One advantage of using a power pack for this application is that I can use the throttle knob to adjust the speed of the Tortoises. The feeder wires on each section of the layout are connected to a single pair of bus wires, and the bus wires from each of the 3 sections (the thick 14-gauge wires in the image) are connected to the terminal block. The bus wires from the future expansion will connect to the unused pair of terminals. The white Romex leads to the Tech 4 power pack (out of view to the right).

Now that I have a functional layout, I'm planning to get started on structures and scenery but also spend some time on my rolling stock fleet. I hope to be able to post more now that most of the heavy lifting of layout construction is complete.