Hi guys just a quick intro Ant from New Zealand

[cteno4]

Tony,

 

sorry i thought i had caught all of those! Somehow when i was using the stylus to make the dots at some point a dozen or so dots got shifted slightly. I thought i had redone them all. Yes those 4 red dots should be slid to the left a bit to where your blue dots are isolating both ends of the those two points. 

 

What I did in this pass was sort of the minimal block wiring with isolated sidings. There are a few places in the yards there and where they connect onto the main line where you could potentially add a few more blocks into doing more operations, but i figured since you are just a 2 throttle operation you will only be running one of the mainlines when you are moving stuff in and out of the yard. It would take a third trotted and 3 way rotary switches [as opposed to dpdt switches] to try to run both mainlines at once while fiddling in the yard. But your yards kind of dump onto the mainline there directly so they dont lend themselves well to having a train running on the mainline while you move stuff around on the yard attached to that mainline. 

 

There is one small issue with the yard ladder in the lower right. Since there is no track piece in the ladder to use as a feeder so you have to power that ladder from the mainline block thru the power routing from the point to the yard off the mainline. Should work ok. You could see if you slipped a small track section between the mainline point and the first point on the yard ladder and then isolate the whole yard ladder at the mainline point and feed the yard ladder points thru that new small track piece at the base of the ladder.

 

Start looking at how you need to set the power blocks to do different operations you were thinking of doing to see if this needs to be modified some to fit your knoodling on how you wanted to run things. I kept it simple at the mainlines just being 4 blocks each with side loops and the center passing siding on each side. You could break the side loops in half so you can pause a train there so you can use the mainline in the yard to move something in.out fast then resume the mainline train, but then more switches on your panel and 6 switches to set for a mainline run instead of 4. This stuff is alway about tradeoffs in flexibility vs ease of use. If you think you want to pause trains in places on the mainline while you fiddle in the yard you can just add some blocks to the mainlines. If the mainlines are on its own control panel then it’s pretty easy to figure out and flip a few more switches. I expect you will usually be keeping throttle A on the outside look and throttle B on the inside loop so you wont be changing throttle much just turning tracks on and off. To help with this you might color code the block witches [you can get little colored vinyl fingers to put on the switches] so that the outer blocks all have one color and inner a different color to remind you like blue is usually flipped up to cab A and green is usually flipped down for cab B

 

When wiring all of this the big thing will be being careful you are keeping the polarity correct to all the blocks so they are consistent polarity to both cabs everywhere. This makes your head hurt at first but it will come clear and just have to keep thinking on your wire colors to each block so they work out working in harmony. 

 

For the control panel you might try just doing a temporary heavy cardboard or thin scrap ply control board at first and then test out the spacing and location of the switches before you make your final board. Just put the unwired switches into holes in your board to see what is comfortable and also how big/thick your graphics need to be for you to easily see what is going on. Control boards get crazy fast. You have to exaggerate the track plan unless the board is huge as the real track plan is just too tight to fit in switches and see the track plan well. Take a look on youtube and you will see some ideas to see what speaks to you visually as i find some dont work for me visually that others find optimal.

 

The panel is going to get dense in the yards will all the point and block switches. This is why I think maybe breaking the two yards off into thier own panels may help. Only issue here is in the yards the block for the main places they dump onto the mainline would be on a different mainline board. But i dont think this is an issue as that block will usually be on all the time to the cab you usually use on each mainline. Think about moving the one yard panel over in front of the other yard so you are not having to look over your shoulder at a distance and mentally be rotating things from looking over your shoulder and then down at the panel. Its much easier if you are just looking up and down from the panel to the layout.

 

cheers,

 

jeff

 

 

[Antnz]

Jeff

 

Thank you again for that, at least you can see that i am paying attention and studying your diagrams carefully. Again i will print this out and read it through carefully, but i can see breaking the yards into there own control panel is the way to go, and on there own side of the layout but close to the controllers.

I think i can get a peace of track between the ladder and the main line i will look at that today, and look at every thing else as well, i feel as if im moving forward i knew this part was going to be the hardest for me its a good job your here Jeff

I will read through this again and then have a good tidy up out there, it gets so cluttered so fast, perhaps im just a messy modeler 

 

Cheers

 

Tony 

[cteno4]

Tony,

 

you are most welcome again. Glad it’s been helpful and getting your brain wrapped around it. It’s mostly that, getting you seeing the main idea then you will take off on the details then. Ive been around this tree quite a few times in the last 5 decades and walked into my number of corners! You are catching on well as you caught my boo boo right away. Bad on me experimenting on doing something like this on the ipad with my new Apple pencil and not just jumping on the laptop with the mouse!

 

No worries we all go at these projects in different ways! Important thing is to keep your momentum up well, but dont rush your self into corners and mistakes. It’s a balance and needs input from your personality. Some are very risk adverse and just a few mistakes can really sour them so they need to be slower and more methodical. Others love rushing in and dont care if they make some mistakes and keeping their speed up is more important to them. Thing is to find your pace and keep to that balance as much as you can to keep things goign and you enjoying it all! Getting things like the trains running is a big big hump and this is a good sized layout and a bit of wiring using the block control. Nothing complex just a fair bit of it to get thru.

 

With your little pwm boards you have you can think about turning them into wired walkaround throttles. You would just need a 4 conductor cable that is like 16g or 18g wire. You run the 12v out on two wires and the other two are the return power wire to the layout. Simple just need some heavier wire for it. Like a 4m piece for each throttle will let you easily walk around or sit in one area with throttle in your lap. Can make little holders for the handhelds at each side of the layout at the yard control panels.

 

You might look at wiring up your mainline first and getting those two loops working and fastened down first. This way you can wire it up to two throttle and at least run trains around the mainline as you then work on the yards. Running trains now and then to take a break is very good to keep you playing and seeing where you are going. Then it lets you keep testing every bit as you add it on by just temporarily wiring up segments as you add them. Helps you see the process and it gets faster and lest prone to errors as well and find ways to speed the process or do it better. The mainlines are pretty simple, it’s the rest that will be more the wiring headache! I would even say wire the points of the mainline first into some, test bcd circuits to get that process and structure all laid out as well.

I would not fasten your track down until your wiring is all done. If for some reason you get fed up with a control panel for all the block wiring you can always just pull the insulating joiners and use the mainline feeds to turn the layout back into a point power wiring layout. Should work ok that way as well. Always good to not paint yourself into a corner and have a backup. Once you are happy with the wiring then glue down your track as pulling it up once glued is a real PITA. With sectional track like this you could even not glue [except on your bridge module junctions] and just drill holes in the roadbed and push in like 1” pins at angles. Would be plenty of stability and easy to pull up if you need to. Will hold it well enough in place and even more in place once you add scenery up to the roadbed.

 

Keep breathing, it’s a marathon more than a sprint!

 

cheers,

 

jeff

[Antnz]

Jeff

 

Wow all good advice yet again, i will concentrate on my bridge today while i take in all your wiring advice, i have already looked at the lower ladder section and yes i will insert a section of track there between the mainline and the ladder, i will loose some length but as you say its a trade off. I am trying to slow down but it is fun so that's hard, but yes i don't want a big mistake at this stage i wont be in to much of a hurry to glue everything down, Evan thinking about your idea of perhaps just tacking it down in a temporary sort of way.

I want to place Neo magnets under the track for uncoupling that will slow me down some i think, but i will do some experimenting first.

I did a test section with gluing a couple of peaces of track with silicon sealer, its stuck and would take some lifting so i think i have a way ahead for my bridge section, i don't think i will need to use the brass screws or the PCB copper board. I should be able to just glue and the cut through the track and road bed with my cut off wheel nice and clean and tidy.

Well Jeff see you in a few weeks LOL

Thank you again

Cheers

 

Tony

[cteno4]

Tony,

 

might experiment with pins in the track. Just drill some small holes at an angle into the edge of the road bed from each side and sink some pins in. Im thinking it could hold your track quite well and leave you open to easily pulling it up if needed. Ive used pins to hold track in place into wood while lining everything up before screwing things down and it’s worked well. But there i was just using the vertical screw/nail holes. Going in at a 45 from each side might be quite sturdy. Just drop of paint then on the pin head to cover it up like ballast. Could put a drop of pva just under the pin head to lock it in place, but you could still easily pop it loose later with needle nose pliers as pva doesn’t really bond chemically to plastic or metal more of just a space filling bond. Experiment!

 

Yeah magnetic uncouplers are a whole nother ballgame to have to experiment with. I never used the magnamatic kadees and such. I did have decent success in the old days with the old rapido electromagnet rapido coupler uncouplers. Noisy suckers and took some practice but got good at it. I even converted one of my yards to a hump yard as i could run it over the uncoupler and stop right at the uncoupler and the cars would roll down the yard some.

 

dont worry if it takes you a few tries getting track cut well. It’s a bit of a practiced art using a cut off wheel, but you get the hang of it after a while. Again a scraficial piece of track is your friend! Luckily the little cut off discs are cheap!

 

jeff

[Antnz]

Jeff

 

One last question then i will leave you alone before you pull your hair out LOL, for my main power lines to connect them to my controllers i could only think of cutting the plugs of some Tomix track feeders and soldering the plugs with attached cable to my main power cable so i can plug them into my controllers, is this what most would do ?? i cant see another way to wire into my Tomix controllers

I can see that my main power cables will be wired into my plug sockets at the bridge section, i think this will be correct and of course the power drops wired to the main power cables , and continue the main power cable across under the bridge section.

I have also added a photo of my practice track glued down a bit messy but it does hold firmly i think id only put dobs of sealant next time in a few spots only and weigh down till set.

[cteno4]

Tony,

 

no worries!

 

Easiest way is to just snip off the plug end a few inches and solder on your main power cable to your terminal strip that it will distribute from to your block control panel wiring. Best to use your 18g wire here. Unfortunately the tomix wire is pretty wimpy, but why you want it for a shorter section rather than long [the longer the skinny wire the more the voltage drop potential]. Just strip each wire end and retwisting clean. Then pretin both ends and you can put them next to each other and just hit with the soldering iron to fuse them. Remember to have a pice of heat shrink on the wire up the insulation to then pull over exposed wire and hit with a heat gun to shrink up and reinstate the joint.

 

Silicone seal or caulking works well to hold down track. You can get it up, but it takes some prying and such and picking of caulking off the track for reuse. Yep you dont need a lot with silicone sealant as it sticks pretty well to plastic and EPS. Personally I’ve never liked gluing track down, im a screw guy, hence why my brain went to using the pins! But like a lot of things in the hobby there are a lot of personal preferences or things that have just worked better for others or just work better in different hands.

 

Now get back to work!

 

cheers

 

jeff

[Antnz]

Jeff

 

Thank you and yes i will leave you alone now and get back to cleaning up my messy layout, but thank you for confirming me me i can proceed with an easy mind

 

Cheers

 

Tony

[Antnz]

HELP !!!!!

I have done a little, i have managed to get the lift out bridge section cut and track glued and wired ( photo's attached )

What i am having trouble getting my head around is the wiring for the DPDT switches for the block sections, no amount of googling or reading seems to come up with a simple drawing or explanation for how to wire these for DC analogue model railway, i have Evan purchased the Atlas wiring book but it is for common rail wiring, also everything i can find seems to wire both controllers together. I have one control for the outer track and the other for the inner. Any way could someone ( Jeff where are you lol ) point me in the right direction on which wire goes where on the DPDT, i have added a photo of what im looking at, i was hoping it would trigger something in my head but nothing happened lol. I am looking at this now while im drilling and placing wires, and yes i will glue only when everything is wired and running properly. But at the moment it is the Block section wiring i am concerned about and sidings

[cteno4]

Tony,

 

take a deep breath! It’s all pretty straight forward on the DPDT switches. You put the track leads to the center leads on the switch and the power pack leads to the outside of the switches. This way when the switch is thrown one direction it connects that side’s power pack’s leads to the center track leads.

 

the only complicated thing is keeping your polarity of the the track and power pack leads consistent on al the DPDT switches. Easy to do for the power packs with like red and black wires. With your track power you need to keep the inside and outside rails on your loops consistent to red and black leads on the track and then on the center terminals on the DPDT switches.

 

your block wiring is not common rail, you will be isolating each side of track blocks. This is a safer way to do things. This is why you use the DPDT switches to control the power feed to both rails at once and not a SPST you would use in common rail wiring.

 

Make sense?

 

jeff

[cteno4]

Main thing to remember is just always keep like the outside track on the left side of the center terminals and the inside track on the right center termial [or vise versa]. Then the same polarity from the power packs on all the outside terminals ie top terminal to cab A and bottom thermals to cab B. You can always reverse the polarity of the throttles at the throttles to make the direction switches make sense on the throttles as you like it.

 

clear as mud?

 

cheers

 

jeff

[Antnz]

Jeff

 

Cheers yes its making a little more sense, the center terminals make sense, i think whats confusing me is connecting to both controllers, when i thought i was using one controller for the outer track and the other for the inside track.  I will have another look tomorrow as its getting late, but i think im in need of a diagram, i know this is probably very simple and im not panicking lol its just not sinking in, i will probably feel pretty dumb when i have this sorted. Do i need more controllers, two for each track ?? to control the block sections and sidings

I can see that once ive put the insulators between the track i then need to get power across those breaks thats throwing me with the wiring, which is why i think i need a diagram.

 

Sorry Jeff

 

Cheers and thank you for persisting with me

 

Tony

[cteno4]

Hey tony,

 

sorry one thing i realized is maybe screwing you up is i screwed up above and said track in stead of rail in a couple of places.

 

with standard block wiring you insulate both rails of a hunk of track on both ends and then supply the power to both of the rail from either of the power packs via the DPDT switch [or total off in the center with no power going to that block of track]

 

Block control like this gives you a bit more control over any block of track as it can be powered from either throttle or off as opposite to the old point routing where you have one throttle wired to the outer loop of track and one throttle wired to the inner loop of track.

 

here is how i should have said the previous wiring using the term rails in the right way.

 

each block of track will have an outside rail that goes around the outside of you big loops and an inside rail that goes around the inside of your big loops. You can trace the rails on sidings back to the mainline loops to figure out what is an inside or outside rail on the siding blocks.

 

Main thing to remember is just always keep like the outside rail on the left side of the center terminals and the inside rail on the right center termial [or vise versa if you prefer] for each block of track. Then the same polarity from the power packs on all the outside terminals ie top terminals to cab A and bottom thermals to cab B. You can always reverse the polarity of the throttles at the throttles to make the direction switches make sense on the throttles as you like it.

 

here is a very fast and crude diagram of how the wiring goes from your two throttles to a block of track thru the DPDT switch. Sorry I did it with the pencil on the ipad really quick so not pretty but gets the idea across.

 

jeff

 

 

[Antnz]

Jeff

 

Thank you so much, i will play a little and come back

[brill27mcb]

Quote

Love the artwork! Must be an AI creation...

 

[cteno4]

Ha Ha! Laugh away! I figured i would get razzed for it! I worked very hard to make it look like a 4 year old drew it! But took all of 30 seconds to get done and just enough to get the the idea across. I dont use the Apple Pencil much and just did it in my lap with the screen vertical in the keyboard holder. Would have been nicer if i did it with paper and pen and then scanned it but so much more time and effort than needed! 

 

My design partner and mentor for 30 years could take a sharpie and make the most beautiful sketches of anything in just a few lines. The dude is amazing and worked in the eames office he is that good. I on the other hand have zero drawing and art talent/skill. Ive tired and tried and practiced and practiced but could never really get much better with form and pretty. I could always lay things out really well as a reflex, but not make it pretty at all. I use to tell geno that he should just do all the whiteboard sketches when we were meeting with clients and I could scribble my ideas fast on a piece of paper and he could do them pretty on the whiteboard really fast then and impress the clients [his simple drawings just made folks mouth hang open]. But he refused to do this and insisted i do my ugly sketches of my ideas directly on the whiteboard as we were in discussions on the fly with or without clients. He said it was better to just work on the ideas and not get folks all caught up in it just looking pretty as that really didn’t count most of the time and pretty could cover up a flaw in the basic idea easily. It worked well. Once an idea took root and major fatal flaws were knocked off geno would do a pretty sketch sometimes to sort of summarize it, but only some of the time. His insistence the idea of what we were trying to do was more important than the pretty designs/drawings in the up front thinking. We could always make it pretty as needed later and it was the idea that then drove the design and not the other way around. He was right as soon as we got into a design meeting no one worried how pretty all the idea sketches looked as if they were good ideas they were sucked into thinking about the ideas.

 

jeff

[Antnz]

Hey it works for me LOL leave Jeff alone lol

Just looking at it again, i need to do a sketch as well

[cteno4]

No worries im use to the snickers and the comments like it looks like it belongs on the refrigerator! I guess i could have done a ChatGPT statement and add “make it look like a 4 year old drew it!”

 

basically all your blocks get wired as above. Of course for the throttle connections you can just do jumpers from switch to switch and then one end of the string go to your throttle. I would do like 18 or 20g wire for these connections between the switches. 18g gives good current, but 20g is more flexible in tight spaces. For the wires out to your track blocks i would use a terminal strip at the control panel to attach your long lines going out to the track to short pieces of wire to go to your dpdt switches. This will help if you have to do any troubleshooting later like a switch got its polarity reversed or something. Also makes it so you can pull the control panel off if needed and not have to snip all your track wires.

 

just strip like 4-5mm and tin the end of the wire and tin the terminal and just fuse them. Goes pretty quickly.

 

jeff

[Antnz]

Jeff

 

Your 30 seconds has taken me days of googling and finding nothing and hours of reading with no information, your 30 seconds actually makes sense and i can actually see what goes where

BUT how do i connect to the inside rail   and how do the wires connect to cab A and cab B ?? is cab A and cab B simply connected together via the DPDT

I can see that i can daisy chain the DPDT via a terminal block

How do i wire up my block sections on the inside track ??

Edited 3 hours ago by Antnz
adding photo's

[cteno4]

Tony, 

 

ahh i think you are retaining the idea of inside and outside tracks both being controlled by separate throttles [sorry I used the shorthand of Cab for throttle] like you would with just using the point routing.

 

with block control each block of track over the whole layout can be switched between your two throttles. This way you could set the DPDTs to be on throttle A from the yard on the outside loop, onto the mainline and then over to the inner loop. Then once there switch all the mainline track loop to Throttle B to run the train there while you use Throttle A back moving trains around on the outside loop. You no longer need to have a throttle dedicated to each of your loops when you use block wiring. It’s much more versatile this way and you can also turn blocks off easily if a train is on them and you need to move something else around on the same loop. 

 

So wire ever block of track on the layout to a dpdt switch and then your two throttles to each dpdt switch. You do the same thing everywhere.

 

sorry i may have confused you earlier when i said inside and outside tracks when I meant to say inside and outside rails to keep your polarity straight on each block.

 

make sense?

 

jeff

[Antnz]

Jeff

 

Its just jumped out at me i have insulated the rails so how do i get power ac cross them ??

[cteno4]

Each block of track you insulate both rails at both ends so the block is totally isolated from connecting blocks. Then you feed power to the block with your power feed [or multiple leads if the block is a long stretch of track] within the block that is then wired to the center terminals of the dpdt. Power is supplied to each block then by its dpdt switch that gives the block power from either throttle A or B or off.

 

jeff

[cteno4]

You may be confused by the partial block wiring using a common rail between two throttles. Its can have some issues and just a lot easier and safer to isolate each block on both rails on both ends and supply power to both rails in a block from the DPDT switch for the block.

 

jeff

[Antnz]

AH ok so when i have my whole layout wired for blocks and lets say i have all my DPDT switched on i could run a train a complete circuit around my layout ?? because all the blocks would have separate power from there respective DPDT switch ??

I think this is making sense and yes i was still thinking a cab power control for the inside track and another cab for the outer, this way i control both inner and outer with both cabs combined via block sections

I think my problem is i wanted to know how it works before understanding the concept

 

Tony

[Antnz]

Jeff

 

Thank you again for your help Jeff, and yes you have made all this a lot clearer, it is starting to make sense, i will drawer it all out and let you have another look. i am glad i asked you for your help i could have been searching for a long time and i can also see that the placement for the power controls cabs comes into play as well, i will have a good look before going to far.

 

cheers Jeff

 

Tony