Christmas

Well Christmas has now come and gone. My friend David has been hard at work on his N-Scale layout. I have helped a little but the most of all of it has been his from layout planning all the way to the building of the benchwork. His work does gove me grand ideas for my layout whenever it gets torn down and rebuilt. I did get a few items for the trains for Christmas. The most important is a new bridge that will span Old Grizzly Gulch. My initial idea for a trestle was not working out ... either due to my failure to keep on task or the million other thing to do. So I got the Cornerstone Single Track Truss Bridge http://www.walthers.com/exec/productinfo/933-3185. I will be a little more comfortable letting the trains rumble across this. I also got two new SOO cabooses to go with the fleet.

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!

The bear awakens ...

After a long hibernation, i am dusting off the website and making a new run at it. I think some of my issue previous is trying to do stuff daily and when that didn't work things fell to the wayside. I am making a schedule to update the site at a minimum of once per week. This will give a good look at what we are doing or not doing and give a good look at the progress of the site and other projects regarding the J & C Western Railroad. Both of use have alot to add so we will be updated frantically to get everyone caught up on where we have been and where we are going. Thanks to every one for visiting!!! Check out the logo we are working on for our layout. I think it is beginning to come together. Let us know your opinions ... thanks again!