First Photos of Tracks, Turnouts and Servos

Here are first photos of the tracks I laid along with turnouts and their servos (mounted from below the plywood, I mean). More to come soon.

See you soon...

Installing Turnout Servos and Decoders

After laying tracks and turnouts on the first section and fixing minors problems with way cars and loco go through them I started to install turnout servos and DCC decoders I bought from Tam Valley Depot. Few days ago I received my second shipment from TVD containing brackets for mounting servos among other stuff. Brackets sold by TVD are resin castings made by Motrak Models. Very well done and the perfect fit for TVD servos.
Mounting servos using those brackets is really easy and everything works really well. Brackets come with everything required to mount them including double-sided tape and piece of spring wire for moving the throwbar.
Up to now I've installed seven servos driven by two TVD's Quad Pic Servo Decoder. I've also already mounted four fascia panels for manual control of five out of seven turnouts (two servos are actually driven by one decoder output since they need to always move together).

I'll post a full photo report of the current status soon, in the meantime few picture of a sample of the brackets, servos and decoders.

See you soon...

New Locomotives

Latest addition to my locomotive roster is a couple of Atlas EMD GP9 Phase II. Obviously Southern Pacific. As usual I've added DCC decoder using Digitrax drop-in replacement decoders, in this case DN163A2. The whole installation is rather simple and all worked fine at the first shot.

So, here are few photos of the new locos. I find these locos well detailed and running really smooth even if I didn't tweaked with CVs yet and basically I'm using the factory settings except for the DCC address.

Lately, I've been working also on laying track on the first section. Work is going on with small problems here and there but overall I'm happy with the outcome. I'll post an update on this soon, hopefully.

See you soon...

Layout Project Updated

Quick post. I updated the layout project that reached version 3. I made quite a few changes here and there, some minor some larger. The whole Con Agra mill has been completely redesigned as well as the Cemex Aggregates area. Few changes also to the area close to Glasscock St. and Fruitvale Ave. Take a look at the project page.

See you soon...

Laying Track, Again

Most likely this will be one of many posts about laying track and turnouts. Anyway, this morning I shot few photos of my progress on laying track on the first section I did during the weekend. Cork strips are all down and I started preparing turnouts soldering a feeder wire for powering the frog, made holes for the feeders and started installing the Tam Valley Depot DCC servos and decoder for moving turnout points. So far I installed two of them and I'm more or less happy the way they work. I'm not gluing down turnouts yet because I want to test fit them together with flextrack.
In the picture below you can see the TVD Quad servo DCC decoder and the tools I used. Also, you can see the actual track arrangement I chose. In the first picture you can see I decided to connect the spur for Fairn & Swanson to one of the track serving Johansing Iron Works. This way I can have an additional run-around. In the last picture there's the area of where Cemex Aggregates will be -in place of 23rd St. and Kennedy St.- with the track serving that industry.

See you soon...