I’ve just completed recreating one of Mr. Perry’s hand-drawn schemas, this time explaining the power routing for block B322, which is the interchange track between the Mainline and the Branchline near Sonora:

Let’s look at what’s going on.

The Rapido RDC Santa Fe has been working nicely on the Branchline with the automation for a few weeks now:

Click on player above to play full video.

These are the latest Rapido RDC Santa Fe, numbers 191 and 192. I had to adjust the front plow as it was riding too close to the rails and actually binding on some flex track junctions. I also did their “break in”, and performed the LokSound “slow crawl” adjustment as well as adjust the volume.

For more history on these unique RDCs, please visit this site: http://atsf.railfan.net/atsfpres/dc191.html. They have a unique story and is quite worth reading and this site actually explains why both cars are looking different.

Description of Issue

Still having some small trouble running RDC ATSF on the Branchline. Two weeks ago I fixed a turnout issue and thought that would be the last of it. Now we have a dead spot, and I’m trying to address that.

RDC ATSF on the dead spot on the Branchline

Looking at it more closely, the track feeder is on the right; next to it on the left is a small 2 inch piece of track then the turnout. Power for the turnout rails comes from the track attached to it.

Tonight’s first attempt to run RDC ATSF 191/192 on the branchline started well. I ran the engine from the mainline to the branchline by using the interconnexion and that worked well. I reprogrammed the automation to use engine 191 instead of SP 10 and that worked flawlessly since they have the same running characteristics. Then the RDC derailed on the way back, consistently at the same location, and this is what I observed:

RDC ATSF 192 approaches Angels Camp station on the branchline.
The branchline features these complex dual-gauge turnout, being both standard gauge and narrow gauge.

Some engines or cars work well here, and some derail. Every. Single. Time. By looking at it more carefully, it’s painfully obvious the bottom point is broken in the turnout, and the top one has a small gap.

Courtesy of the nice folks from Rapido Trains Inc., I’ve experimented a bit with this on Saturday:

These are the latest Rapido RDC Santa Fe, numbers 191 and 192. A preliminary run worked fairly well -- I had to adjust the front plow as it was riding too close to the rails and actually binding on some flex track junctions. They need to run a bit more to be broken in, and I still need to do the LokSound “slow crawl” adjustment as well as adjust the volume.

I’m hoping they will be part of the daily automation in a couple weeks at most.

For more history on these unique RDCs, please visit this site: http://atsf.railfan.net/atsfpres/dc191.html. They have a unique story and is quite worth reading and this site actually explains why both cars are looking different.

Description of Issue

A few hours after temporarily fixing T320 on 2019-02-13, the mainline turnouts stopped working while I was trying to switch in the Stockton Yard.

Slow-motion turnouts are powered by two regulated DC power supplies, one for DCC turnouts and one for non-DCC turnouts (there’s a 3rd AC power supply for twin-coil turnouts as used in the yards). Checking them showed that the non-DCC turnout power supply had shutdown. This happens would typically when there’s a short on the power bus and the power supply protects itself.

The power supply has a 10A fuse in serie on its output, so a quick test is to simply open the fuse, and indeed this allows the power supply to start again. Once the circuit was open, with a ohmmeter I checked the turnout power bus and it cleared showed a short.

Description of Issue

T320 is a crossover that brings trains from block B321 to B320 in our normal running direction.

After working flawlessly for 2 weeks, the automated trains started stopping and shorting on this turnout last week.

Right in the middle of the layout is a fairly large industrial city. When visitors walk in, it’s right in the middle visible above the Mountain Panels.

When I discovered the layout back in 2014, this part of the layout was not powered, and it is still not functional today. I had started looking at it back in 2015 and realized there would be quite some work involved in making it fully functional (as in “tedious but not impossible”). But does it need to be fully functional? Since the layout runs as an “automated exhibit” now 4 days a week, I just realized this area has some great potential for some simple but effective automation even within its current state, and that would add great value to the visitors.

This represents the industrial park of the Fairfield, California and includes a good portion of street running. I am not sure what year this represents. This was designed for switching. There’s a dedicated control panel in front of it (see below).

The track plan:

Courtesy of Tom Eikerenkotter and Jim Evans, the freight train is now pulled by a New York Central Hudson steam engine:

Train 5278 approaches the Sonora Station pulling a short freight.

As usual, computer automation controls the train movement, light, bell, and whistle. It starts when motion is detected in the room. This route works in “shuttle” mode. The train automatically moves to the small station and then reverses to the main station after a short stop:

A NYC J-1 Hudson (4-6-4) pulls our short freight train on the Automated Line on the HO Scale DCC Layout at Randall Museum, San Francisco.

New York Central “Hudson” 4-6-4 steam engines were originally built by ALCO for NYC in 1927-1931 to pull passenger trains. Our operation is unique, pulling a short freight train with an SP caboose! ;-)

Over the last year we had a number of automation failures, and one thing that quickly became obvious was how hard it was to remotely identify that the automation had failed and why or how it had failed -- we were not always immediately notified and many times details were lacking. To work around this, I first added a couple Wyze cameras at strategic locations. Here I am solely interested in identifying whether the trains are running and whether they are stopped at the right place at the end of the day.

Although that was a good start, I needed a better way to handle this than made available by the Wyze mobile-phone app, and so I recently created a web page for the Wyze cameras with the ability to capture the state of the automation: