Trying to strive for a balance between work I want to do on the layout versus things I believe need to be done, coupled with their direct impact (either for operators or automation) and work complexity.

Here’s a current list:

There are more tasks on my list; these are all I’d consider important for now.

The “need” vs “want” is highly subjective. Saturday Operators would likely have the narrow view that their needs are more important than future automation work, and I have to fight the sempiternal syndrome that “things are working, please don’t touch anything anymore”.

“Impact” is from the perspective of the Saturday Operators or the Automation from a public point of view, e.g. would people notice this work has been done. Low impact does not mean the task is not important -- it’s the “behind the scene” stuff that enables more to be done later.

I’ve had some plans for the automation from the very beginning, I focused on what was most critical at first, and have slowed down a lot in the implementation since then. It does not make the long term plan any less important, and having year to year incremental improvements is a good thing. A lot of these “low impact” tasks would enable future automation work by detecting trains in blocks currently not monitored or enabling turnouts to be controlled.

For some of these tasks, I have already done a significant amount of preliminary research and I have the hardware for it.