Things are cookin’ along. I have installed all 10 of the tortoise switch machines in lower / North staging (5 on each end). All but two are wired in and powered via the DS64’s. The last two are going to be powered via a “Wabbitt“. At the moment I have one of those two working but I am having some challenges getting the second one to work. I am waiting on some feedback from DCC Specialties as to what the issue might be. I put a label on the side of each machine with it’s address to make it easy to determine which is which..

I decided to mount the Tortoise machines on the surface of the layout rather than underneath mainly for ease of installation and maintenance and accessibility. Since this is a staging yard, I am not concerned that they can easily be seen.

The only item really remaining now for North staging is to get the facia panel built. It will have pushbutton control for each turnout along with LED indication as to whether the turnout is “closed” or “thrown”. Each track will also have a corresponding route programmed for it which will also be displayed on the panel.

Another recent accomplishment is that there is now facia installed and painted on about half of the lower level (thanks for the help J.J.). While this always sounds like a quick and simple task to me, it ended up taking at least a couple hours or more to get this done. It does go a long way to making the layout look more finished.

I also have started the process of installing the facial panels on the first level. Each major interlocking will have a panel that shows mainline turnout status. In addition, I have decided to have facia pushbutton control for certain spurs and yard leads. Mainline cross-overs are controlled only by the dispatcher (or by throttle if you have a DT400). I thought I would share my process for making the panels.

First, I create an image in Excel to represent the track diagram for the panel. Here is an example:

Next, I cut out a piece of clear acrylic or lexan to fit the size of the diagram. The material you use here is not important, but you should be familiar with how to work with it as the different types of material have different properties. So far I think I like the lexan best as you can cut it with a saw and drill with a normal high speed drill. The downside to the lexan is that it is a bit more expensive. The acrylic material that I used previously was very brittle and you could only cut it by the scribe and snap method (which wasn’t always successful) and you had to drill it very slowly. I lay out a printed track diagram then fix the clear material over it so I can drill out the spots for the LED’s and the pushbuttons.

Here’s one on the workbench ready to be installed.

Here is one after installation along with a good shot of part of the newly finished lower level facia.

For the LED”s I use a 3mm bi-polar red/green LED wired in line with one side of the Tortoise power feed. I ensure that the LED is green when the turnout is “normal” or “closed”. For the pushbutton I use SPST that you can get from Radio Shack or probably many other places. The pusbhuttons are wired into the inputs on the DS64’s and SE8c’s.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 20th, 2009 at 2:22 pm and is filed under Construction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.