Back in 2015 I spent quite some time “reviving” the Fairfield Industrial Yard [*], cleaning the tracks, identifying which turnouts still worked or not. And yesterday we had our cleaning engine 1201 attempting to clean the Fairfield tracks again!

So far I cleaned a few feet on two tracks only. Progress is slow as this has not been cleaned for a while and there’s a lot of track in “pavement” that is hard to clean -- neither the rollers nor the pad car can get to it easily. So it will take a while, and that’s fine.

The goal is to have some simple automation on this -- basic shuttle back-and-forth running. No turnout automation at first.

[*] Speaking of names, which one is proper? Fairfield Industrial Yard or Fairfield Industrial Park?

The NCE EB1 circuit breakers for Fairfield and Stockton Station are now installed:

DCC is now provided to the Stockton Station using a dedicated power district on the “West” terminal:

The Mountain Turnout Panel has this little mysterious “Front Yard” toggle at the bottom, and for a long while I could not understand what it was connected to nor what is purpose was:

Now I understand that flipping it right or left connect its output to the Mountain 1 or Mountain 2 panels power:

Happy New Year 2021 from the Randall Museum Model Railroad team.

The museum has been closed to the public for a good portion of 2020. However we kept doing maintenance on the model railroad. After nearly four years off service, the Napa and Bridgeport yards are back at being fully operational for Saturday operators to take advantage of. The lights & bell are back on the Fairfield grade crossing. Other maintenance and improvement has happened which is not directly visible to the public yet will help long term.

Looking forward to a reopening of the museum to the public in 2021!

Update: Finally traced the one white + two red wires that were the output of the obsolete “Normal / Children’s” plug for the DC Junior Engineering Day, and which I removed. I found this:

This exposed crappy-looking connection is key to all DCC power for the Mountain 1 panel. Seriously.

The white wire converts to a black wire that then connects to the main terminal under the Mountain panel:

Once again here we can see all “common grounds” are connected together at the terminal. This also bridges the “common” from both boosters used for Mountain 1 vs 2 directly.

The amusing thing working on a mostly-undocumented quinquagenarian layout is that most electrical circuits work in layers. Clearly stuff has been added later, then sometimes retrofit and upgraded, etc. As I found out, trying to remove any innocent-looking obviously unused old piece of equipment can result in a lot of fun. As in “mystery puzzle kind of fun”.

Task of the day: Removing the old plug for the Junior Engineer DC console. This little plate & connector on the left side of the Stockton Passenger station. I’m updating the station panel for a circuit breaker to later add more automation block detection and turnout control. I could use the space. That obsolete plug can go away, since it hasn’t been used in 5 years and it will not be used ever again. How hard can that be?

Doing so totally broke power to Mountain Panel 1. Why?

Time to deal with installing the two new circuit breakers. One for the Fairfield industrial city, and one for the Stockton Station. The former is not powered at all. The latter is powered in a convoluted way from other parts of the layout, and I need it separated to both solve issues and make it suitable for automation. This all needs careful planning to investigate all the possible options.

Location for the breakers. One philosophy is to place the breakers near their usage panel, which makes sense for a walk-around layout design -- the EB1 makes it easy to have a LED on the panel indicating when there’s a short.

The other philosophy is to place all the breakers together, which makes it easy to glance which one is shorting. Since this layout already uses the latter design with all the current breakers together, I’ll stick with it.

Boosters which I have selected for these:

After about 3-4 hours of work, the main two-lane cantilever grade crossing is now installed at Fairfield:

First run, before adjusting sensor sensitivity or timings -- works really nicely out of the box.

And it’s functional, with the Grade Crossing Pro/2 module, the sound module, and speaker!

The control module is installed under the layout:

The speaker is installed next to the Fairfield control panel, with a toggle to cut off the sound as needed:

Today on the bench we have a Logic Rail Technologies Grade Crossing Pro/2:

That is going to replace the module that I had previously installed on the layout back in 2015.

Experiment on the bench first, to check everything out:

This is a newer version of the previous Grade Crossing Pro. For comparison, here’s a picture I took back in March 2015 of the brand new one I had installed back then (that’s the module that was unceremoniously removed):

I recently installed an auto-reverser on one of the two balloon tracks at Bridgeport, as indicated in the previous Bridgeport post. In between I ordered a second one and today I was going to install it.

Two engines led by Walthers Mainline UP 8823 enter the outer balloon track at Bridgeport.

For the auto-reversers, I settled on using the Tam Valley Depot Frog Juicer Auto-reverser; I really like them, they work very nicely.

Unfortunately when the order arrived, I had a little surprise: