Thread: Builder's Railroad Project: in the Beginning...

I got every cut. The last piece was cut yesterday, then I made many, many trips to the cellar carrying as many pieces as I could myself. I laid them out on floor to see the fit and compared it my Visio drawing. It seems to fit very closely to plan. Here's the layout as it stands now. There are five big pieces missing that my son in law is going to help me carry down tomorrow.



It looks a little foreshortened in this picture. I took it with the iPhone since my "real" camera was left in my daughter's mini-van yesterday. The fit was generally good with all these puzzle pieces except for a few minor problems. All of these problems were the result of my decision to change the intersection angles on the curved pieces. I got the bright idea to make the ends reflect the angle as projected from the center of the arcs they inscribe. This worked okay, except where it didn't. Case in point: see this picture.



The "spider" piece in the middle is the most complex layout of the bunch. The angle on the right side was originally supposed to be vertical just like the large adjacent piece. I neglected this relationship, and enscribed it with the radial line. Unfortunately, the adjacent piece is constrained because it's 8 feet wide and ran edge to edge on the sheet and couldn't be angled outward to conform to the spider. The result is this wedge shaped opening. I will fix it when I go to mount the panels on the framework. I'll scribe the line 2" wide of the right hand piece and cut off the angular part of the spider and put in a splice piece. No problem.

Here's another example of a slight mismatch that I'll fix as I go along.



I checked clearances for the swinging door on the back curve that's going to provide easy access to the inside, and nicely, it clears the Lally column and will give good access to the interior.

Then I woke up this morning at 6:00 a.m. thinking about building the layout. I solved several problems including improving the way I'm going to attach the diagonal braces on the wall brackets, reintroduced my brain to using the water-level to set the level from one extreme part of the layout to another, and lastly, while I wasn't going to put Tyvek on the ceiling like I did in the old house, but reconsidered.

Here's what this looked like.



This is the "poor man's dropped ceiling" and was the idea of my old friend who was the lead vocalist and keyboardist in my 60's rock band, and is an electrical engineer in Oklahoma City. I was looking for a way to stop dust and spiders from invading the layout. Both would raise havoc on models. While the public side of DuPont Tyvek has huge graphics on it, the reverse side is pure white. It's tough and water-resistant. It's easy to install. After stapling to the joists, I use the Tyvek tape to seal the seams. No spiders can get directly in.

So today I went to Home Depot and bought two rolls. Each covers almost 500 sq ft and I have about 750 sq ft to cover. Tomorrow I start the installation.

Here's another tidbit. When the railroad was built in Germany, it had two characteristics. It was "cab control" and was built to be disassembled and put back together easily. The former works like this. My transformer has two separate throttles, right and left. I wanted to be able to run two trains simultaneously anywhere on the layout. This is done by breaking the layout into a series of blocks (in my case 30 or so), and having a single-pole, double-throw toggle for each block. Flip the switch to one side and the right throttle would power that portion of the layout. Switch the toggle to the other side and the left throttle would power that block. Put the switch in the center and that block would be off. This creates a lot of wires, but did give some decent operational flexibility short of full digital control.

Now to the second condition. To make the railroad come apart and go back together again with this cab control feature meant that I installed separating terminal strips at every junction. You can see how many junctions there were, and each had 8 wires on both sides. Not only was this a slow and complex process since every wire entering and leaving each connector had to be tagged, but it introduced more risk in the design AND probably added electrical resistance that wasn't needed. Here's what the underside of one panel on the old layout looked like. This was typical.



If you've ever seen the inside of a pinball machine (the old style) this is what it looked like. It did go back together. If you looked at the other side of this panel, the track and roadbed was attached and completely wired.

On the new layout neither condition will be present. I am going to use modified cab control and won't have to use all those connectors. This layout isn't coming apart until we move (not likely) or I die (hopefully not likely soon), so the wiring can go all the way from the source to the terminus without intermediate connections. This will speed up the building process greatly. I'm also using completely out-and-back wiring to make it ready for Mike's Train House Digital Control System and also Lionel's Trainmaster Control. This allows you to run any number of engines at the same time since they are each addressed individually.