Rethinking Sumida Crossing
28 June 2014 23:22 Filed in: Design,Administrivia
Well, that was a long break. Two months without a post. No, it wasn’t anything serious. In part, just life getting in the way of this hobby, but more a realization that I’d lost my motivation somewhere. Not really intentionally, I took a break to clear my head.
It was really longer than two months. In March of 2011, about 40 months ago, I took apart the wiring for the functioning DC-powered Sumida Crossing and began the conversion to DCC. The railroad had been designed for this. It should have been simple. It turned into a nightmare. I distracted myself by focusing on other (important) aspects of the layout, and kept the two outer tracks live as switchable DC/DCC, but without all the bells and whistles of DCC I’d planned, so I could continue to run trains. And for a time I kept working on the conversion, but less and less got done there.
Last year I set out to make a short tram layout, something I’m still interested in, but that was really a distraction, and my latent unhappiness with the main layout colored that work. As did my tendency to perfectionism; I kept not doing things while I tried to work out the One True Way to do them, and that never works. After a burst of activity in April, that all came to a halt.
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It was really longer than two months. In March of 2011, about 40 months ago, I took apart the wiring for the functioning DC-powered Sumida Crossing and began the conversion to DCC. The railroad had been designed for this. It should have been simple. It turned into a nightmare. I distracted myself by focusing on other (important) aspects of the layout, and kept the two outer tracks live as switchable DC/DCC, but without all the bells and whistles of DCC I’d planned, so I could continue to run trains. And for a time I kept working on the conversion, but less and less got done there.
Last year I set out to make a short tram layout, something I’m still interested in, but that was really a distraction, and my latent unhappiness with the main layout colored that work. As did my tendency to perfectionism; I kept not doing things while I tried to work out the One True Way to do them, and that never works. After a burst of activity in April, that all came to a halt.
Read More...
