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This is a newer version of the previous Grade Crossing Pro.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:

How are Tortoise wired on the layout? A lot of the existing mainline turnouts use a terminal block. This makes it easier to prepare the turnout machine at a bench, and then install it in place without soldering. So let’s replicate this. What is the current wiring pattern?

Some examples:

Tortoise at Mainline T110:

Terminal block = 8 positions (1 == right most).

• Terminal 1 / Green Turnout Control ⇒ Tortoise 8.
• Terminal 2 / White Turnout Control ⇒ Tortoise 1.
• Terminal 3 / Yellow = not connected.
• Terminal 4 / empty.
• Terminal 5 / empty.
• Terminal 6 / Red = DCC bus red or from rail A ⇒ Tortoise 3.
• Terminal 7 / Orange = to frog ⇐ Tortoise 4.
• Terminal 8 / Black = DCC bus black or rail B ⇒ Tortoise 2.

To reverse the switch, it’s possible to invert the green/white either on the bus side or the tortoise side. An 8-position terminal block makes sense to be able to use both switch contacts. In practice, I rarely see that being used.

On the Fulgurex at T450 Bridgeport, the conventions are different.

The last couple visits at the museum were to deal with Lodi. The original premise was extremely simple as elaborated in the previous post about Lodi: provide access to the block B905 leading from Lodi to Fairfield for switching purposes. Jim indicated he tried to use it only to find it had no power. Since this block is powered off Fairfield, which is currently powered off, the trivial fix was to cut the block in two by creating a gap and then power it from the Lodi side.

Lodi on the left, mainline (the dark rails in the middle), and the Fairfield B905 block on the right.

That did not go smoothly. In fact so far it has gone absolutely nowhere except to create more work for what was supposed to be a trivial thing. Oh well. C’est la vie.

Bridgeport after some more cleaning and adding a few structures we had laying around:

Today I cleaned the inner balloon track of Bridgeport using our cleaning engine 1201:

As indicated yesterday, the strategy is:

• Manual scrub the track with the Woodland Scenics Track Cleaning tool.
• Run 1201 pushing a roller and pulling a pad car.
• One drop of ATF on the roller pad does help a lot.
• The ATF is combined with manual scrubbing and then running 1201 back and forth several times -- rinse and repeat till the engine goes on smoothly.

What I found in the past is that using too much ATF or Wahl oil just makes the track slippery and attracts more dust in the long run. However one drop of ATF spread out by the roller car creates a smooth film which is visible at first. Then with the scrubber, it does help clean the track till it’s shiny enough and we don’t notice any ATF on it.

I also installed the auto-reverser on the outer “Loop 1” balloon track:

I’m using a Tam Valley Frog Juicer Auto-reverser; I really like them, they work very nicely.

I guess a better title would be “Digitrax DS64 and Fulgurex do not match”. Well, sort of.

From http://www.clag.org.uk/fulgurex.html:
        “Fulgurex motors, as best as I can find, draw around 200 mA when in motion.”

And Digitrax has a technote for the DS64 essentially saying to not even try:
        “the Fulgurex motor draws too much current for the DS64”

Although the Digitrax technote indicates the Fulgurex could use “up to 400 mA”, which seems a bit excessive… or is it? I did notice on the Napa ones that I do have a severe voltage drop when driving two (!) Fulgurex at the same time (it’s a crossover). IIRC it was in the 5-6 V range instead of the expected 10-12 V. That means we’re taxing that little DS64 yet the Napa Fulgurex(es) still manage to work, albeit a bit weakly.

That did not work with the Bridgeport Fulgurex though. Voltage was dropping at 3-4 V, which was not enough. Likely that one is using a bit more current.

Anyhow, the Digitrax DS64 I installed last week is out, and in goes a new NCE Switch-8 with an NCE Relay Board to control that Fulgurex, and now everything works as a charm:

The panel is still a mess though, and this is wired as such:

We now have DCC control for the Bridgeport turnout, with some caveat:

For this I used a Digitrax DS64 to control the Fulgurex slow-motion motor.

As I said… “with some caveats”: