5 Hours of Soldering and a Sore Neck...

It took a couple of weekends, but its finally done. All the wiring under the table and above the table (i.e. the control panel) is complete. Feeders wired into the bus (the red and black 12-gauge wire seen on the left), wiring to the switch motors and spur blocks (Cat5 wire). You'll also recognize the power supply that I made several posts ago feeding +5V and -5V to the control panel, and I decided to put the main AC switch (bottom of the picture) on the skirt of the table rather than in the control panel. This made me a lot more comfortable, not only by not having "high" AC voltage in with the low voltage control panel, but also made more sense from a cable routing standpoint.

The control panel was also fun to wire up. 6 dual-pole switches for each spur block, a single pole momentary switch for the turntable motor (but I don't have that yet), 7 LED's each with a current limiting resistor (that's what most of the heat-shrink tubing is for that you see), and four momentary buttons for the switch motors. All in all, it went together pretty well according to plan. I only wired in one LED backwards and mixed up two buttons -- fairly easy fixes.

But the biggest payoff for all of this work is the ability now to have a train run around the layout! Which of course I have done a few times now...

42ft of Track Later

Well I finally got around to laying all of the cork-bed and track. I'm actually pretty pleased with how it went. I ended up using a lot of pre-formed "snap track" for the curves and flex track for the straighter sections. This made my curves a lot more predictable, but I'm kind of wishing now that I used flex track more, as using the snap track everywhere means a lot of joints in the loop.

You'll notice there are some spurs off of the turn table that are missing, but these are to go inside the round-house which I have yet to get. Once the round-house is in place, then the track can be laid inside it.

I've also got all of the switch motors and wires in place, its just a matter of connecting up all the wires to something useful. I've got about 6 feeds from the track to underneath the table where I'll run around a 14- or 12- gauge wire for track bus. Copper wire makes a much better conductor than coated nickel track, so feeding the in multiple places from a copper bus should make the power distribution on the layout much more even.

Anyway, lots of wiring and soldering to do, especially on the control panel...