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!