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?

I found some old paper labeling the terminal connections, they only refer to this as “Industrial”.

The yard control panel is pretty neat, it was a nice build:

This in turn connects to a dispatching terminal block under the layout:

It’s neat looking and I have a document explaining the number for each terminal, which had been fairly accurate in the past. There’s a rotary selector with three power sources (Block 130, Block 110, Yard) which I’m bypassing to have only power from the new DCC power district. There’s also a power feed for the turnouts as they use AC voltage twin-coils; I had those partially working before, yet I’m not going to focus on these for a long while.

I do have scans of the paper documenting each terminal position, and I shall post that in the layout documentation page.