Miscellany and March 2011 Status
March was another of those “not much obvious happened” months. I did manage to get the layout back together, with two of the circuit-breaker/block-occupancy-detector systems wired up. And I installed some lighting in the Subway Station as a test. But I still don’t have the track back together and operational (I’m waiting on some more DCC electronics on order). In the meantime, I’ve amused myself with several things and some work on the website as I plan my next moves.
First, I’ve taken more photographs of the Overhead Transit Station (photo above) and the associated platforms I’m using on the Urban Station scene, and updated my pages for it and for the Unitrack platforms. The photos were also added to the Stations photo album. Once I get the Riverside Station track operational, I’m going to be turning my attention to the Urban Station for a time (and as noted last time I’ve added a page about the Urban Station itself). I have some new track (Kato’s new V15 20-874 set and 20-875 single-track concrete-tie track) on order for that, about which more after it arrives. I really like the combination of the Overhead Station (and expansion for a second platform), the new platforms, and the V15 set; this makes for a really nice modern-looking station.
I’ve also done some more testing of DC power packs, checking out the behavior of pulsed power on motor temperatures (no effect that I could measure) and examining yet another power pack. The notes on both have been added to the DC Power Pack page. Photos were added to the Electronics photo album.
And I built another of Don’s LOLBoosters, and ran some tests for him. Not much to say on that, but I added a couple of photos and some text to my page on it.
In between projects, I took the opportunity to clean up my organization of some of the older pages related to track and stations, creating a Track and Stations index page under the Model Trains page (and cleaning that one up a bit while I was at it).
And I finally got around to making some decisions about how I was going to wire up the lighting power bus, and gave that a page of its own. I’d begun this as I was reassembling the Riverside Station, but had to give it some thought after that, before finally deciding what changes to make. I now am ready to start adding lighting as I work on finishing up stations and building scenes. I expect that work to be ongoing for the rest of the year (and probably longer). I did some more cleanup of the Electrical index page as well.
As usual, I have more ideas for what I want to do than I have time to do them. Getting the track wiring into a final (or near-final) form in the Urban Station is probably the next big thing, but I may take a side trip into doing the actual “street” behind the station, and adding lighting under the station using the new LED Strip lights I used for the Subway Station. And I’ve been thinking about working on the final version of the Expressway for months now. I really need to finish the embankment under the expressway too (there’s some retaining walls there I never built, plus a hole where you can see into the subway, which ought to be another retaining wall). I’m not lacking for things to work on.
