Well it's 2013 already...no wait, it's already FEB 2013...already! Don't worry, I haven't been sitting on my butt doing nothing. Quite the opposite.
In January I had a friend down from Portland, Dave Waterstreet, and he stayed for the planned 3-day maintenance session PLUS an additional 2 days so we could get lots done on the railroad. It started out as an electrical problem search and ended up with some productive things getting done.
Although I really don't think we ever found the electrical glitch, we did get both staging yards set up with turnout routing. That is a great help to operating the staging areas and now will make it easier to select a route and KNOW it's been selected properly.
We also installed the electronics to handle the Wye/Loop arrangement at Goshen Jct. That was fun! But it works now.
We also discovered that I had some wiring no-no's that really were probably part of the havoc issues. For various reasons I've replaced turnouts in spots (mainly due to Atlas point failures). When I designed and built the railroad I gapped each section at the turnout. Since then I've added block detection. So when the turnouts were replaced I wired them for block detection, which meant that the gaps were not at the turnout but at the turnout clearance point. And of course, now only gapped on rail for the detection. Well, I was not paying attention to where the district gaps where and failed to gap both rails in THREE locations. Needless to say, this caused problems with everything! So that got fixed and it all seems to be going well so far.
I've been working on (mostly in my mind) about how to do ops on the railroad. Car cards is one option although I hate playing with car cards and the issues they cause. One option is to operate with a Clerk as Seth Neumann does. A position I love to operate. Another option is using JMRI Ops. Not decided yet. However, using anything but car cards (with photos on them) brings up the chance that many will not be able to read the car numbers (this is N scale), let alone the car without a photo on the card. Any thoughts on that, please let me know.
I'm sure there are things I've forgotten that Dave and I did but as I remember them I will post.
Have fun,
Frank
