Recently the Mainline automation was back at using the good old Athearn UP 8736 engine. After the fiasco of the Walthers units, I’ve decided to try something different, so here we have the Mainline automation train pulled by this new Bachmann UP 9538:

Whilst I was at it, I’ve changed the Mainline Freight train to use SD70ACe 1072 instead of 1067. These are two Bachmann engines that have proven quite resilient and successful over the years. I recently cleaned 1072 and it’s running fine after a good cleanup of the wheel power pickup.

UP 9538 is a GE Dash 8-40CW, replacing the EMD SD70ACe. I chose these engines because they are modern and highly recognizable.

UP 9538 is currently an experiment. I want to give them a few weeks to evaluate how well they behave in automation. The engines use a more modern TCS Wow Diesel, with a fairly capable “current keeper” capacitor as can be seen in this loco chassis image.

I personally do not like TCS decoders due to their Dual Function, Pagination modes, and Audio Assist which, ironically, I think makes them unnecessarily more complex instead of simplifying their usage -- that thing basically maps 3 different functions all on the same F8 function key, and IMHO is extremely confusing to use because it means function buttons can suddenly to different things if I mistakenly press F8 by mistake.

However when reading the TCS decoder manual, I was glad to find out that CV 242 can be used to disable the Audio Assist feature, CV 117 can be used to disable the Pagination mode feature, and CVs 238 and 241 can be used to disable the unnecessary Dual Functions. I tried that on the programming track, and it made the DCC decoder much more predictable to use, and it works adequately with my automation program.

The TCS Wow Diesel seems to make a decent job at reproducing the angry bubbling noise of the Dash 8-40CW prime mover. I’m honestly not too keen on the sound of these GE 7FDL16 engines; I think the EMD 710 prime movers sound much better, not to mention their cool air startup sound sequence!

I just swapped the Rapido Amtrak 204 train on the Branchline, and reinstalled the good old Rapido RDC SP 10:

That little engine had been the workhorse of the automation, back in 2017 on the Mainline, and back in 2018 on the Branchline. It’s back again on the Branchline automation for a little while, to give some much needed rest to the Amtrak 204 engine.

The RDC SP 10 is a Rapido engine, and I gave it a pretty decent overhaul back in 2023.

The speaker was dead and got replaced. I originally replaced it with a 3rd party similar speaker I found (it’s an iPhone 4 loudspeaker style), and then later got the proper part from Rapido’s excellent maintenance support team.

The two motors were both in bad shape, not running well, and very much out of sync and no longer speed matched -- which is a common occurrence on these Rapido RDC units.

After I got new motors from Rapido, I proceeded to install the new motors, which is no small task. Except what I did is install only one motor. Since the engine now has only one motor, it’s a bit weaker and can’t make it up the grades on the layout; however the Branchline has only a very very small grade so it’s not a problem. On the other hand, there isn’t a second motor to get out of sync and fight with the first one, and it means I have a replacement if and when I need one more motor swap.

The decoder, besides being an ESU LokSound (they don’t really seem resilient in the long term), is doing reasonably well on these units. In this case, it has only one small residual issue which is that sometimes the engine stops responding to sound-off commands until it is power-cycled -- which will happen at the end of the day anyway when the museum staff turns off the layout.

The only issue remaining is that the RDC SP 10 derails on the new Branchline turnout replaced by Orion. Consequently, I changed the automation to have the engine stop at the station before the turnout. That means that I can’t program it to clear the branchline and allow a train to divert from the the mainline to the branchline.

After a not-so-short retrospective, let’s look at the future/pending projects in the pipeline:

KTLO stands for “Keep The Lights On” -- we use that in the software industry to encompass all the invisible yet essential tasks that maintain systems in operations. I was not in the habit of listing these tasks before: all the layout repairs to turnouts or dead spots, or all the time dealing with automation engines that stop working -- because I can’t predict these, obviously, and when they happen they take precedence over whatever pending task I’m working on anyway.

However it turns out that these tasks account for at least half of my time, if not more. A lot of my planning involves having contingencies so that the layout automation is running 5 days a week, all year long.

It’s been a while since I’ve updated my public project list… 2021 in fact as well as a follow up in June 2021!

So it’s time to look back at what has been accomplished and what the future/pending projects are in the pipeline.

First, it’s important to remember that the goal of such a project list is just to give an overall direction and priorities. As such it needs to be kept dynamic. And indeed since 2021, a lot of work has been done that was never anticipated -- a few planned things got done, and a few new projects were added and completed:

Let’s dig in the details of what got accomplished -- this is a mix of “planned projects” and, unsurprisingly, a lot of on-the-spot maintenance that takes precedence over projects:

UP 8736 is back on the Mainline Passenger Automation:

Both Athearn engines 8749 and 8736 have been the workhorse of the automation from 2019 up to 2022. Towards the end, they were still working however my notes indicated some speakers “plopping” sounds and the engines being a bit more sluggish. Originally the Walthers UP engines were supposed to replace them, but I had only problem after problem with the Walthers roster -- it took me a year and a half to get the Walthers engine working correctly. In 2024 I was finally able to use them in automation, and yet at the end of the year the Walthers engines already had mechanical problems cropping up. I’ve been very disappointed by all the brand new Walthers engines I’ve used recently.

Recently the automation has been challenging when running in reverse down from the mountain:

Happy New Year 2025 from the Randall Museum Model Railroad team.

The Passenger Train stopped working on the Mainline automation yesterday. The train was nowhere to be found on the remote cameras, yet JMRI detected the train’s presence on block B360 -- that’s the curve just before reaching Summit on the mountain.

Since I wasn’t in a position to go to the museum to investigate, I remotely updated the automation script over SSH to disable the Passenger train and only run the Freight train on the automation.

When I got there today, I found this:

That’s a new one as I had never seen a derailment at that spot before.

From there, every effort at fixing the situation pretty much went wrong one way or another.

I’ve just installed “Ambiance” on the layout, a LED fairy light string which is controlled by the train automation computer:

I’ve been working on that little project for a while. It is built around an ESP32 embedded controller running a custom software. The automation computer can send configurable light patterns and animation to the controller, which in turns controls the lights.

The lights will vary depending on the season. For example right now I have a simple green/red pattern, whilst around Halloween I will have a yellow/orange pattern:

SP X1225 just arrived in town, with a selection of adequately themed freight cars:

The engine and the caboose were custom painted by Steve B. Thank you for your contribution!

I was told yesterday that the turnouts in Napa Yard were inoperative. Now, that’s not a huge shock since last week I worked on the Richmond Panel and disconnected a couple unused DC track power leads. It would not be the first time that we find some totally unrelated connection between distant places on the layout.

So let’s look at the Napa Yard:

Here’s what the panel looks like when we open it:

Upfront I can notice that the track power (orange wires) are separate from the turnout power (yellow wires). This is actually as it should be. So now “all” we have to do is follow the turnout wires. They are conveniently located under the layout and a bunch of things have been piled in front of them over the years, making access impossible. So first, I spent 10 minutes removing a cabinet, and before I could even do that I had to remove a couple unused DC equipment components: