As some of you know I have installed the Walthers HO Scale 130 ft turntable which will service a 12 stall roundhouse, 4 garden tracks, and a couple misc tracks like this:
I have some questions about SOP for tracks in Roundhouses:
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Would it be advisable to install some sort of bumper/stop at the end of the tracks to prevent heavy/strong locomotives from blasting through the back wall? I foresee moving a locomotive from the turntable into the roundhouse and getting momentarily distracted “Squirrel!” and having a Trix Big Boy go right through the back wall.
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I have soldered feeders and fed them through the benchwork for all the tracks in the Roundhouse. I would like to be able to manually enable/disable track power for each service track. My plan is the run all the 22ga BLACK feeders direct to the track power bus (black) and to run the 22ga RED feeders to a 12 position terminal block and then run 18ga wires to one side of STSP switches on a fascia control panel and run 18GA from the other side of the switch to the track power bus. Is this a reasonable plan?
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Which turntable control panel layout do you prefer? The blue square represents the Walthers turntable control box.
Panel A is layed out to represent how the tracks are arranged around the turntable and it includes the turntable ‘id’ numbers for the three inbound/outbound approach tracks. Panel A is also rather large (about 13" x 13") so it would stick down below the fascia pretty far (unless I come up with a hinged mount that would allow it to project out somewhat horizontally from the front of the fascia).
Panel B is much more compact but a user would have to KNOW (or figure out) which service track ID corresponds to which track on the layout. And it does not show the turntable track IDs for the three approach tracks.
Panel A