First Open House

I had my first open house last Friday evening...sort of. Lisa and I had some friends over for a rather chilly bonfire. Since many of our friends know that I "play with trains" in the garage but have never seen what I have been building, I decided to clean things up a bit and make the layout as presentable as possible., After all, it was on a direct path from the beverage refrigerator to the fire pit!
I decided to treat it as an open house, so in the afternoon I spent some time tuning two opposing trains running around the layout.

I had one minor accident when I forgot and left one of the crossovers,,,engine to engine meet! But otherwise, the running went well and my friends enjoyed watching the trains. Success!

A little too fast

I am at a stage of the layout building that I really enjoy. Most of the work so far has been very focused on a specific aspect of building a model railroad: paint the room, install lighting, build the benchwork, add the foamboard subroadbed, lay the cork roadbed, and lay the track. In most cases, I really could not go far without finishing the previous step.
Now I can begin to do things in parallel which keeps the tasks small and interesting. For example I can wire some of the rails while painting the scenery breaks. I can rust some rails while adding individual ties where there are gaps, etc. But, there is still something of an order.
I decided I would start ballasting and cover at least the ends of every spur. Why? Because if the ballast is down, then I can install the concrete or Hayes bumper to prevent any rail cars from taking that last great leap! I did one track in Penn Hills and decided to do all of Hermine since their are 3 colors of ballast - light for the mainline interchange with P&LE, medium for the spur leading to the coal mine and coal cinders for the tracks under the mine. I had 2 sections placed waiting for glue when I realized I had not rusted the rail, which I now have to do without painting the ballast rocks.
Remember - step one comes before step two....

Pulling things together - a peek

I am now doing several small,  but somewhat time consuming jobs to get the layout ready for some serious operational runs. Electrical is complete and I need to create 3 or 4 more LocoNet cables for the DCC wiring to be complete. Last week I painted some foam board for the scene dividers but was a little disappointed - they all curved when the paint dried! Well they will do for temporary and I think I have an idea for a more permanent solution, but that can wait.
Last night I spent some time "rusting rails" which is a pretty simple step where I drag a paintbrush along the outside and inside rails where the operators can see them. This dulls the shine and with proper ballasting I  think makes the track look pretty realistic. I mentioned I reused many pieces of track from the last layout so naturally I installed a lot of them backwards, so the 2 rail sides I rusted before are facing the wall instead of the aisle. Too many details to worry about while I was laying track.
The other thing I am doing is installing the Caboose Industries Ground Throws (I used the 202S). This is actually a 3 step process where I glue a short piece of cork, then a piece of .040" plain styrene and finally the ground throw with a piece of piano wire for the actuator. Once I get into a groove, the install goes pretty quickly although there are a couple of switches I have to get a little fancy with. I finished the first one last night on the inner mainline across the bridge and hope to finish the rest of that section of the layout tonight.
While I was waiting for super glue to dry, I put up a couple of the scene breaks and I have been placing some buildings on the layout as well to determine what industries are located where. It is really coming together very nicely.

Irwin's West Yard in the foreground, Penn Hills on the left side of the peninsula

WCC No. 4 Coal mine sits at the end of the peninsula's right side

E, McKeesport, bridges are the scenery breaks here

Electrical Complete

One of the projects I was not looking forward to was running the feeder wires to the rails. I remember crawling under the last layout, soldering every rail and complaining about the task, my knees and my back. Since this layout is about 4" lower than the previous one, I was not looking forward to it.
When Bruce was over last Sunday, I mentioned that soldering the feeder lines to all the rails was the next task. He asked why I had to do every single rail and I got to thinking ... he has a point. Why not soldering at least one connection to every power district and add additional drops in areas where I notice the trains slow down. This means I would only need 5 or so drops and the electrical would be done.
I installed terminal strips at points around the layout (one per power district plus one) and ran the 16 gauge bus between them. I use the convention of RED wire is the rail closet to the aisle (south rail) and BLACK as the rail closest to the wall (north rail). I did about 1/2 of this wiring Friday night and Saturday morning I started to drop some feeder wires. I crawled under the peninsula and discovered I had very methodically connected the RED wire to the BLACK terminal strip and the BLACK wire to the RED terminal strip.

I can mess up even carefully labelled connections!

So much for labeling! Actually, I saved myself a short later down the road because it was so obviously wrong. I finished the bus wiring and all the feeders by Sunday night and was running 2 trains in opposite directions on the inner (south) and outer (north) track. Great progress!

DCC Installed

When Bruce was over Sunday, we used alligator clips to attach an old MRC power pack I have and run a train around the track. Because I had already installed the insulators to create 5 separate Power Districts (PD) we could not run on the inner mainline nor onto the peninsula but it was neat seeing the train finally go around.

Finished trackwork on the peninsula, coal mine is left foreground.

I was a little hesitant to install the DCC right away because I wanted to build a support shelf under the layout - one under the Irwin Yard where I would initially place the DCC booster and one under E. McKeesport for later expansion. I spent some time yesterday wiring in a master ON/OFF switch to turn off the lights over the layout lights and on my workbench as well as the DCC components. It was remarkably easy thanks to some advice from Eric D. I began moving things around the under layout storage and realized one of my drawer units would make a perfect shelf and within an hour I had wired DCC to the layout and ran the train again, this time under DCC.

Master ON/OFF switch above white drawer unit. DCC sitting on gray drawer unit.

Obviously, I was pretty excited. Two more major items crossed off my too do list during my work break. I installed terminal strips around the rest of the layout and the next step will be to run the 16 gauge bus wire around all the terminal strips and install the UP5 and UR91 throttle connection panels so I can install the LocoNet.
Too much fun!

Tracklaying Complete

What a productive weekend! I spent a few hours in the trainroom Friday evening and laid most of the cork roadbed on the peninsula and then all day Saturday finishing the track. Done! I even placed a scenery divider on the peninsula so I could get an idea of how things would look running.
Bruce came over Sunday to check out my progress. We walked around the layout and I pointed out the slight modifications I made from his plan - added a spur at the mine for a boxcar of supplies, and another track in the East Yard. I also pointed out where a few of the curves were less than the planned 21" including the lead into Herminie which I ended up just using the Atlas 18" rail pieces I had on hand - looks just fine.
We were looking at the trackwork in East McKeesport when he said, "I see you took that one siding out. Looks good."
"What? What are you talking about? I did not leave out any spurs.!" I replied.
Except for the one he pointed to on the diagram, Oops.
Flow the instructions Eric.
It almost worked out, as I have one extract Atlas #4 switch (the standard on this layout) but of course it's a left hand and I need a right hand. Good thing the Cincinnati NMRA Div 7 Train Show is this coming weekend!
A old MRC powerpack, 2 alligator clips and we ran PRR 8805 GP7 around the track for a while. OK, not perfect but still progress!

PRR Irwin Track Plan in XTrakCAD

Well, it took some real struggling, nearly a year of messing around and some fudge this week but I finally put the trackplan that Bruce created on paper in XTrakCAD. I am pleased with how it came out and since I determined the various power districts I wanted, I was able to put each one on a separate layer so I can see the whole track plan or show just a power district.

Current layout in XTrakCAD

The door to the backyard is in the upper left and across, upper right, is the door to the garage. Walking in from the garage, you encounter the West Yard which has 3 tracks and the RIP (repair in place) track. Another step into the room and this is the liftout to get into the train area (although I have not cut the track yet so can't remove it!).
I use the convention that when you are facing the layout (inside the layout), you are facing North so West is left, East is right.I will go into more details on the Power Districts once I finish some research but basically I am create some isolated blocks so a short on one block will not affect the rest of layout.