So, we fired up an old classic my wife enjoys, "Goonies" and went to work. My wife Carrie worked on sewing the test panel for the layout skirting. I continued to work on cleaning the layout room and organizing the final bit of stuff. I hung up the signs and placed my railroad artifacts/collectibles on the new shelf installed last week.
I installed a small 3ft shelf under the end of the layout by the window and relocated my NCE DCC power system to it. It needed to be located at the end of the bus wire chain. I will permanently affix a programming track for locomotives on this shelf. It will be covered by the skirting.
My wife continued to work on sewing the test panel, while I worked on attaching the feeder wires to the bus. I'm happy to report that the layout is completely wired now! Yah!!! I'm happy about that! I performed a quick test to make sure all the tracks were live. We're good! I need to work on testing each track, turnouts, file down any solder spots, etc now. Such tough work! :-)
We decided to attach the layout skirting to the layout using velcro as suggested by my friend Allen in Nebraska. We needed some more materials though.
Before we headed out, my wife helped me take down the test LED lighting strip I had installed on the ceiling. There was a couple things wrong with it.
1) the LED strip wasn't secured properly to the 1x2
2) The 1x2 needed to be located further back over the operators head. It was located right above the layout and casted shadows on some of the cars toward the front of the layout.
3) the lighting really needed to angled down vs. shining straight down.
Went to Ben Franklins and Home Depot. I found some white art sand that should work for scenery on the layout. Also, I believe it will work for weight in the sand hoppers. It sure seems heavy enough. I will have to test to see if I can get enough in the covered hopper to add an ounce to the car weight. I don't see where it will be a problem. So, how about that? The sand hoppers will actually be moving sand!
At Home Depot, I picked up a test piece of crown moulding.
This evening, we came back home. I stapled half of the velcro strip to the bottom of the 1x4 benchwork frame behind the fascia board. Carrie worked on gluing the other half to the test panel she sewed up.
We then both worked on installing the LED light strip to the test crown moulding piece. All the glue will need to setup so we can test both tomorrow.
I fired up the soldering iron and went to work on the two turnouts that were damaged. One was in East Ottawa Yard, the other at the East Crossover at Utica. It took some time and patience, but I was able to remove the throw bar by heating the PC board with the soldering iron. I cleaned it up, drilled new holes for the ground throw and re-installed. It probably took 45 minutes, but I was able to repair both with no problem. It was simply time consuming. One had a broken throw bar due to me drilling the hole to close to the side. The other at Utica was damaged by me trying to fix a broken point. I completely goobered it up with too much solder when trying to repair the other night. I'm glad to have both fixed and working again. That was stressing me out that there was track issues of that magnitude.
So, all in all, a great day working on the railroad. Do you want to know what the best part of it all was? The room functioned just as I had envisioned. My wife (and kids) at times were in the room together working on projects, while watching tv and hanging out together. I think the conversion from v1.0 to v3.0 is a success!
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