A wiring we will go ... a wiring we will go ...

So for this week it has been wiring, soldering, and trying to make the underside of the layout something that can be understood. Though with the spaghetti of wires under there it makes it difficult at times. There has been a couple key things that have been accomplished during this portion of the construction. First we broke the layout into 7 power districts with short protection. We used 1157 automobile taillights for the short protection. An important note for this is to realize that all the feeders that are on the same polarity as the taillight needs to be wired into the taillight. This was something that we found out after scratching our heads a little bit. Once it is all wired correctly the system works very well. The only power district we did not add the short protection was on the lead in and lead out to include the pull out bridge of Old Grizzly Gulch. Our thought were that if a short happened at that point we would want all of the layout to lose power. In regards to Old Grizzly Gulch we added power on/off switches to power the bridge and the lead in and lead out. This will allow about 12" prior to the bridge to be dead if the switch is off, which will cause a runaway train to stop prior to diving off to the floor. The next item that we accomplished is that we added a power terminal box. With this we have one lead from the Digitrax booster and all of the feeders have their specific places within the terminal instead of 10 lead soldered together. I will be posting pics soon to show these projects. Visit again soon!