In which DB still can't weld wires to save himself.
While you were sleeping, I have been undertaking a few other experiments, but they can wait for another episode. Some tracks were stuck down with contact glue and the odd staple, and the next step was to attach some wires to the tracks and see if the thing works.
I like to generally use red and black wires for my 'bus' wires under the layout ("blacken and read out" is how I remember the colour for inside and outside rails). But prefer brown (it's a shade of red!) and black for the droppers attached to the tracks. This is because in the past, red wires have show up like dogs proverbials above the tracks. Yes you can paint them later, but this is my shortcut.
To further make things easier underneath, all the inner rail brown droppers were placed about 5cm from all the outer rail black ones. This makes it easy to link them up to bus wires and also eliminates any risks of shorts since I was too lazy to use that shrink insulation. I stapled the bus pair in the correct orientation, and once confident with the operation of the whole schemozzle, I will put some dollops of hot glue to fasten them to the boards.
When soldering, as you can see, I come from the "the more the merrier" school of solder dolloping.
OMG!! It works. And even before a dusting with the Peco track rubber, the DF ran incredibly smoothly at super slow speeds over all the points. By the way, all this track has been recycled from previous layouts, so all is likely between 15 and 25 years old, that monty-sized bus wire was underneath Tehachapi until about 2008, and of course that Digitrax dates from about 1996.
A little shunting was even possible, very little, given the very limited backshunt available!
I followed Darryl P's advice and put a coat of primer on the south end yesterday!
2 comments:
Finally some views of long lost items of NZ120 on rails. This is like the excitement created on the Trackgang Layout a few years back at Palmerston North show, when Herr Dandruff arrived with a box of legendary items and allowed operation of them on the layout.
Yes, it will be nice to see what still works! Some of the really old stuff looks more hokey than I remember and best seen from a distance! Merry Christmas!
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