Show me your best wiring porn

[Specter3]

I just put the floor in the train room and Christmas break is only 3 weeks away. I will definitely get some time over the holidays to get some more serious layout work done. I am really starting to think through wiring and how to keep it neat looking. I will be running detection with RR circuits and eventually signalling when somebody gets a decent D type into production. I know there are a couple in the works from chatter here so I am hoping that they will be ready in a year or two when I start to really want them. But as far as plugs and blocks, and terminals, and such what are you guys doing? Show me your best wiring porn please.

[wazzou]

I'd point to @BCR 570 , @C855B or @DKS as the wiring tidiness benchmarks.

[C855B]

Yup. Was off looking for the photo links. Three examples:

[James Costello]

I need to throw @GaryHinshaw and TehachapiBC out there too.

[peteski]

My friend Ernie Poole's MRL layour is a decent example.  Ernie worked at IBM as a field service engineer for few decades, and it shows. 



Control panel that shows the railroad's schematic with LEDs for turnout indicators.



Another control panel at one of the yards (hinged out for servicing)..



Viewed from under the layout.



Under the layout wiring.



More wiring.

[Specter3]

Oh yeah, thats the stuff. More please!

[C855B]

Bottom line: packs of 1000 zip ties are your friend. 

[GaryHinshaw]

I need to throw @GaryHinshaw and TehachapiBC out there too.

Hmm, I would never tout my wiring as a paragon of neatness.  But since RR-CirKits were mentioned, I'll add a few shots showing some of my installed components.  First, primary control of the layout is managed from this station:



One comment about this setup: wi-fi devices (e.g., the jmri/CATS laptop, phone throttles, etc.) connect to the layout via the RPi 3 hanging off the router.  This Pi has two output USB connections: one to the DCS 240 for train control, and one to the LocoBuffer USB for layout control.  These use completely independent Loconet networks, and all of my RR-CirKits boards hang off the second net.  I then run two separate instances of jmri on the Pi, one for each connection.

The layout controls under Kern Jct and Bakersfield staging are much more complicated because of the high concentration of turnouts, blocks, and signals there:



The RR-CirKits boards are sized to sit in Snap Tracks (which they sell), otherwise you need to come up with your own mounting system.  (This panel is a work in progress: e.g., none of the Kern Jct signals are in place yet.)  Other than that, my style is very similar to Ernie's above:



Prodigious use of terminal blocks, consistent colour coding, and (in my case) just a modicum of order.

The last comment to make is: Document Your Work.  Consistent colour coding is part of it, but all of my digital electronics are documented in jmri, and the board IDs are labelled with a label maker.  This is indispensable for a reasonably large layout.

[mu26aeh]

I envision doing stuff looking about half that good and end up with spaghetti.  I'll try again on version 3.0

[CRL]

I don’t get intimidated by even the best scenery because I understand the breakdown of the component steps to achieving the final effect.

However, I find the quality of the work in this thread to be very intimidating. 

[tehachapifan]

My neck, back and knees hurt just looking at all these wiring jobs.

[basementcalling]

Remember, if it's DCC all you need is to hook two wires to your layout and you are good to go. 

[CRL]

Apparently, you hook two wires at a time to the layout.

[peteski]

Remember, if it's DCC all you need is to hook two wires to your layout and you are good to go. 

It is . . . if all you are hooking up is simple track power (without any turnouts).  That is the big selling point for running trains with DCC.   It is called a "sales pitch".  Still, even that simple 2-wire hookup allows you to control multiple trains on that track powered with just 2 wires.

But on most layouts then you still have to wire the turnouts (frogs), street and structure lighting, and whatever else needs power separate from DCC.

I know you were just joking, but I took it seriously. 

[CRL]

And of course, if you look under a multi-cab DC block controlled layout with detection & signaling, you see even more wiring, switches, etc.