Last evening, I drove the last of countless spikes on the mainline of my layout. No fanfare; just drove it home, checked the gauge, then moved on to drilling holes for feeder wires. There is still some trackwork to finish, including a logging spur and some staging yard tracks, but the mainline is ready to go. Almost . . .
. . . when I was finished hooking up the wiring underneath, I turned on the DCC and found that there is a short somewhere. I’ll go looking for that tonight, but it shouldn’t be too difficult to find as I only made a few connections since the last time the layout ran. I did check my PC-tie handlaid turnouts for possible paths for a short, but couldn’t see any. I’ll check the wiring first, then come back to the turnouts if I don’t see some other problem.
Looking forward to solving the problem, then running a train on the new trackage!
Congratulations on this big step, Tom. I’ll bet it is fantastic.
If you have any commercial turnouts at all, is it possible two facing each other at each end of a siding are reversing polarity on each other? If the handlaid turnouts have PCB ties, it could be that you have a metal filing of copper still wedged between the sides of a gap, or that you actually missed a gap entirely. I have come close to the latter once or twice. [:-^]
Found the short, right where I thought it would be on the back leg of the reversing loop. Once I cut gaps in the right spot, the short went away. Of course, now that leg is electrically dead, so I’ll have to drop two more feeders to power that leg before I can run a train on it.
Also, I discovered that 6" of track on that leg had not been completely spiked down, so I guess my declaration of a “Golden Spike” on Sunday was a little premature. Hopefully, I’ll have a few minutes this evening to finish the job and run that first train.
Congratulations on completing your trackwork. At my present rate of progress, I may match you some time in 2037…
Of course, the UP and SP met and had that big ceremony back in 1869, that ‘finished’ the transcontinental railroad. Was it really finished? A look at some aerial photos of eastern Utah and Wyoming reveals plenty of places where the UP main used to be - before they moved it. And the SP built the Lucin Cutoff - not to bypass Promentory, but to shorten and straighten the route…
Chuck (Modeling Central Japan in September, 1964 - eventually)
Drove those last spikes on the reverse loop last night, soldered feeders to it and flipped the switch. Nothing! there was still a short somewhere. Then I realized what I had done. I keep my feeders and bus wires color coded. When I was attaching my feeders, I was working from the “mainline” side of the loop and arranged the feeders to match the arrangement of feeders on that side of the layout. Instead, I should have flipped them to match the feeders on the staging side of the loop. So I pulled the feeders out, reversed them and re-soldered them. This time the DCC came right up and I ran that first train without a snag. Success!
Right now, even with my DCC, I am still relying on the old fashioned DPDT switch to change polarity on my reverse loop. With DCC, I don’t even have to stop the train to do this! However, I realize that having to manually flip my DPDT every time a train moves through the loop will be a real pain, so I’ll have to start shopping for an DCC auto-reverser. Any suggestions?
A switch is the cheapest solution.The train has to stop at the turnout, someone has to throw the switch, the train can go on, and one from the caboose has to place the turnout in normal positon. [:)]
You can get auto-reverser from Digitrax, or the Hexfrog from Fast Tracks.
