The HO Scale Delaware Avenue Branch

[perezbill]

I forgot to post this earlier. I have left the ditch light era and gone back to my first love. My modeling era has moved back to 1957 in the PRR era which I find a lot more interesting. There were more locomotive builders back in those days and locomotives were vastly different and there was more variety than today. To me, today's locomotives all have that same "family" appearance. There are many locomotives I cannot identify. I find 1st generation RRing so much more interesting which is probably why I also like history......but that's a different subject for another time and place.

[perezbill]

No pictures yet to post today but I did get some work time in last night on the railroad.

• My control panel is painted up and ready for its track diagram
• I managed to get one of my frog juicers installed
• I got the power to the command station routed to where I wanted it to be
• I took a lot of time to label all the wiring that was completed and what was added
• My cork sheets are now under the complete section I am working on
• The remainder of the track has been glued down in the section I am working on
• I need to get some pin stripping sized tape this evening so I can get the track diagram completed
• Power supply for the electric uncoupler ramps is installed and plugged in
• Power supply for the first frog juicer is installed and plugged in
• Once the track glue is dry, I will cut the 1st set of rail gaps to the area I am working on
• I need to finish up wiring my feeders and frogs
• I have tortoise mounts to work on
• My Rix products switch stands are in

That's about it for now. Mainly the focus is working on the control panel so I can get the diagram, lights, and switches installed. The only outstanding ordered item right now for me is the LCC items which should be coming soon.

[perezbill]

Last night I got some work done. It wasn't that much because I need my control panel finished to get wiring installed as I go.

• I got my control panel track diagram taped off and painted the base color. I repainted it white again after taping to help prevent bleeding under the tape
• It will be painted black and the tape removed when that dries so I should have a black panel with a white track diagram
• The light green color will be used on a strip at the bottom of the panel which is where the switches will be placed
• I got my 2nd frog juicer installed and wired into the dcc buss
• I took several photos of the progress including some of the wiring underneath at the request of a friend who wanted to see it

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[pjm20]

Glad to see you are able to continue your layout build and thanks for sharing your progress.

[perezbill]

I have had the chance to work on the layout the last couple of days. Here are my current updates.

• My LCC items have arrived, and I have started looking at the programming of them. Sorry no pictures yet of those items
• I have the control panel painted. Still needs touchups but the majority of the painting is done. This will allow me to start working on more of the wiring
• I assembled the first of many RIX products switch stands

That's about it for now as I have been busy with some other obligations. I do my best to do at least something, even if it is a small something, between 3-5 days during the week. This way things keep moving forwards. Hopefully as I develop my techniques on this part of my layout, working on the other parts will be a little faster as I will not need to develop certain techniques.

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[perezbill]

Progress from the last couple of days.

• Cut some more 1' feeder wires which will be needed soon.
• I wired in all my frogs. Miscounted frogs by 2 so I will need another frog juicer. Only a double though.
• For what it's worth I wired up 10 frogs last night.
• I wired in my electric uncoupler from Rapido.
• I got the switch mounted on the control panel.
• I did make a change to the green color on the control panel. I didn't like the original green color, so I purchased a darker green color and love it much more.
• I ordered 1000' of cat45e cable from Amazon. It 24-gauge wire and makes great wiring for block detection.
• I ordered some PRR position light signals from D5 DEM LLC for the area I am working in. https://modelsmiths.d5dem.com/
  

For now, that's about it. It's going to be a lot of wiring currently as items show up. I am hoping to be able to run a train by the end of the year in the area I am working on.

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[basementcalling]

For several years I have been looking at building a model railroad. I looked at many published plans. I drew up custom plans myself using different software to draw them up and see what would fit my available space. I have used different software such as cadrail, 3rd planit, xtracad, anyrail, and scarm, all at different times over the years. I ended up settling on 3rd planit. During the outbreak of Covid-19 in the beginning of 2020 I was laid off from work. I had a lot of free time on my hands and used that time to polish up some 3rd planit skills a little and make a final drawing for the chosen plan. The chosen plan is the Delaware Avenue Branch which was in model railroader; I believe it was March 2017's magazine. The plan is also in MR's track planning database on their website. It took me probably a good month or more to get the plan drawn out in 3rd planit the way I wanted it. I increased its area size from 9' x 12' to 13' x 17'. My scale in this case is going to be HO. Based on the original size I was not able to get switches to fit the plan in its original configuration, that is why the dimensions changed. My approach to building this plan was to 1. Get the area cleaned up where the layout would occupy. 2. Get benchwork built. 3. The plan would use hand laid switches...in this case Fast Tracks hand laid switches. The rail used is Atlas code 83 rail on everything. Now that I knew what I wanted to build I had a few needs and questions to be answered so I could start working. One of the questions concerned building Fast Tracks switches with Atlas rail. Tim Warris was extremely helpful with the answers I needed. Basically Atlas code 83 rail fits Fast Tracks code 100 fixtures. Since the base of the rail on Atlas track is the same on both code 100 and 83 I can build switches with both sizes of rail in the same fixtures.

To Be Continued....

Please share a track plan. It'll be interesting to see how you compress that much prototype into that amount of space, exorcist in HO.

[perezbill]

The plan I am building was originally from Model Railroader in, I believe, 2017. I forget the month. Here is what the original looks like. When trying to draw it out myself I had to increase the size as it was too compact to correctly fit the size that MR said it would fit.

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[perezbill]

Last night's work RR work session was dealing with LCC. I have all the boards I need for the part of the RR I am working on. Just working on configuration using JMRI.

[perezbill]

Sorry for not posting more this week. Work has been extremely busy, and I have not worked on the railroad since Sunday night. Having said that, I do have some pics from Sunday night I took. I got the LCC components mounted to the layout. I also managed to get more feeder wires soldered on the rails. I have as yet to attach them to the bus wire.

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[perezbill]

I finally managed to get down to the layout room and work on it. Last week was a bad week at work and I didn't have the energy to work on it. Even last night was difficult to work but I managed to get the bulk of the feeder wires soldered to the tracks. If I need to add feeders it will be on a as needed basis from this point. All the main feeders are in on the section I am working on. Sorry no pictures this post. Pictures of feeder wires is really not that important as most people know what they look like. Next project is to install the block occupancy sensing magnets on the feeders and solder the feeders to the main bus wire. Once done I will need to cut some more rail gaps.

My upcoming projects list in no specific order:

• Finish connecting feeders to main bus wire with block detection magnets attached
• Attach tortoise switch machines to switches
• Make sure electric uncoupler is working correctly
• Build and attach switch stands to turnouts
• Cut track gaps where needed
• Setup and configure LCC boards

[perezbill]

Managed to get some work done last night. I got the remaining feeders attached to the bus wire. Magnets for block occupancy are installed. Now I need to wire in the magnets to the detector board. No pictures again...wiring is really not that photogenic anyway. 

Hopefully I will be able to work on that tonight, or at least get it started.

Feels good to have progress again.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone.

[perezbill]

I have been working on the layout. I have run into a little bit of a snag. I can say that my blocks detectors are all wired up.

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The part where the snag happened is the tortoise switch machine is not throwing the switch points all the way over. I racked my brain last week trying to figure it out. I stumbled across a video on YouTube that gave me the answer I needed.

I managed to source wire using the video as a guide. Now I am waiting for it to arrive.

On a brighter note, I was at a train show a couple of weeks ago and managed to grab myself a nice little haul.

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That's it for now. When the new switch machine wire arrives I am hoping to have my bending jig made and also hope the wire works.

[perezbill]

I have been having issues getting my tortoises to throw my hand-built fast track turnouts all the way. The throw was just not long enough to move the points all the way over. I have recently switched to servos to do the job. They have a 180-degree throw and using 0.037 wire I purchased from Fast Tracks worked. I managed to get my first turnout to throw all the way in both directions. What a relief this is to get past this extra-large "roadblock".

I am waiting on ServoIO-LCC module from Sprog DCC to arrive so I can finish up the hookup of the switches to the panel button control. https://sprog.us.com/lcc.html

I purchased some Breakout Quik-Link boards from RRCirkits, http://rrcirkits.com/description/index.html so I can attach buttons to my panel and have them throw my switches.

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The actual servo motors and mounts were purchased from Tam Valley Depot. https://www.tamvalleydepot.com/products/servosaccessories.html

Here is the first one mounted and ready to go. The only thing I did that is not in a picture was I used Gorilla double sided tape to attach the servo to the mount and the mount to the layout. There are screws that hold the servo to the mount and screws to hold the mount to the layout, but the tape is the 3rd hand you need to get it mounted until you can get screws in place. Besides the fact the tape will provide some extra holding power.

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[perezbill]

I managed to get another couple of switches hooked up to machines over the last couple of days.

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I got another button installed on the control panel for the latest switch.

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The LCC servo driver was installed and attached to the LCC network.

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I also got my buck boards from Amazon so I can control voltages to devices. In this case I am using a universal power supply to run my electric uncoupling ramps. I am using the buck board to keep the power level from exceeding 16v in this case it is set to about 15.3v. Despite the change on input voltage the output remains within about 1 volt of what I set it to. This will prevent accidental overpowering the uncoupling ramps.

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