Sept 1 2006

Long time and no update, sorry about that. The layout has been running with DCC since November 2005. However it was not without some issues.

Our plan of three power districts along each part of the layout presented a few problems for the wiring crew. Along the Oneonota and Otiso Valley sections a number of the drop wires were crossing to the wrong power districts and shorts were shutting down the booster instead of tripping the breaker on the EB3 card. This pointed out a shortcoming in the wiring plan of not having the bus wires broken down with terminal strips or other 'service points' to make breaking the problem down into manageable areas.

We also found that the EB3's needed the light bulb solution to make reseting work better. They were interacting badly with sound locos and the MRC reverse loop modules. The final solution solved both those problems and gave us a remote display of which power district was shorting. The light bulbs are type 1141 tail lights wired in paralell with the breakers. Those lights are remote mounted above the layout so everyone can quickly see which district is having issues. I will include pictures and better description later.

We resumed operations around January 2006 but didn't get things (major issues) down until the July session.

July 1 2005

The rail soldering folks are catching up on the drop wire installers. All of the wires are installed on the Oneonta side of the layout and soldered in place. The center part, Grand Gorge - Wolcot Bay, is starting to get the drop wires. Extra care is needed here since the 'right south' rail runs opposite the prior sections.

To make room for the wiring to the DCC bus wires, we started removing the DC local yard panels from the Otisco Valley, Oneonta, and Skaneateles Junction. The rail feed wires have been rolled up at the spot where they connect to the rails. The bus wiring team will have the option to use the DC wires in addition to the new drop wires. This makes the section ready to have the DCC bus connections installed.

June 2005

Drop wires are being installed along the Oneonta side first and then the Kingston side. First the mainline is being done then returning and doing the sidings next. Each rail section is getting a drop wire. Also at turnouts each stock rail gets a feed wire as does the live frog. At this point the gaps are left alone, later during the wiring to the DCC bus gaps will be cut in the rails as need. Many of the current turnouts have gaps in the right places but most of the yards, which used point feeding for the turnouts, will need more gaps installed.

Soldering of the drop wires to the rails has begun. A resistance soldering unit has been brought in by one of the members and that makes both the ease and quality of the solder joints wounderful.

An inspection of the wires in the tunnels shows that adding new drop wires would be rather difficult. The number of feeds provided from the existing DC connections will work well for the DCC and shall be reused for those connections.

May 2005

Installation of the main bus wires was done first. These are pairs of 14awg wire running the length of each leg of the layout. Three pairs are installed in each leg of the layout. They are connected to a EB3 on each booster. Each bus covers about 50 feet of total length and the ranges of each bus over laps the other two from the EB3. The EB3 is connected aproximatly midrange on the bus.

The wiring team has started installing drop wires on the layout. These drops are 24awg solid wire, about one to two foot long. The standard is a red and blue wire, with the red wire on the right rail facing south. The wiring team is just drilling holes and dropping wires into them. Later a team will come around and solder the wires to the rails.

Arpil 8 2005

At our meeting we discussed two ways to go about converting the layout. The initial plan had been to run the layout on a limited basis (only one booster) via the existing DC wiring system. Then we would rewire a section at a time of the layout to the distrubted DCC bus wiring and add two more boosters.

The adopted plan is to hold running DCC until we are ready to rewire the whole layout. This will involve teams going around the layout instaling new 24awg wire drops to all the rails. An estimated 500 drops will have to be installed for all the track on the layout. In general each section of rail will have it's own feed wire installed.

Once all the rail drops are installed a marathon session will be held to cut out the old DC wires and connect the new DCC wires. The bus wires are 14awg pairs, split about 3 inches apart. Each of the three boosters had a NCE EB3 board giving three adjustable power districts per booster. Where the drop wire will reach the bus wires, they will be directly connected. Otherwise 18awg wire will be used to make the connections, generally less than 2 feet, to the bus wires.

March 25 2005

Worked on testing the block detector circuits and how they work with DCC. Identified that they will work very well with DC or DCC. Since these are "Optimized detector" boards they are not isolated from the DCC circuits. Currently they are all installed at the central point under the CTC dispatcher location. To use them in the eventual DCC installation they would have to be moved to different parts of the layout.

We reverted the layout to DC mode. This was planned due to the up coming Open House on 9 & 10 April 2005. We felt the bulk of the club members need more time to be comfortable with DCC before running an open house using DCC. Many of the members have special trains they run during the open house and have not had time to convert them to DCC. Plus some of the older locomotives may be more work than we feel worthwhile to convert to DCC.

March 18 2005

Worked on testing some of the sidings and yards. What sort of problems I'm finding are all effecting DC operations too, but finding them while running DCC has been much easier. Right now they fall into the following types:

• Poor point pressure at turnouts
  The mainline sidings are all slow motion switch controls. In many cases there are mechanical issues (binding or arm restrictions) which limit the pressure at the points of the switch. All our turnouts are hand made and both of the points are connected with a brass throw arm.
  Wheel set shorting has not been observed (as of yet), but we are using a very limited pool of equipment for our testing and those have been carefully checked for wheel gauge. The turnouts are also continuous rail through the frog so each turnout is double gapped at the ends away from the points.
  I was using the 'burn your finger' method to test a yard ladder to identify which turnout (all point fed, no extra jumpers yet) is not conducting well. Answer is the one that burns your finger when you push on the points. Dirty points get rather hot due to the resistance of the dirty points, the load was the standard test quarter on the tracks.
• Track joiners not having a good electrical connection.
  The solution to this is adding bond wires across the rail joint. Additional track feeds would be added if these were long pieces of track. But the sort of track sections I'm finding are the couple of inch lengths usually found near turnouts that were either used to fit the turnout (made on the bench) into the track work or were the leftover needed to connect from a standard length of track.

One thing that has gone well is the use of existing wiring from the CTC to the track for this phase of testing. We don't have a RRampMeter but using a good DVM as a reference there seems to be less than a volt drop from the PowerPro to the track.

One thing I've run into is that Brian's sound equipped loco will not program on the programming track! I kind of expected that, it being sound equipped and that most systems don't supply enough current to the programming track to run the sound chip. It's currently still at the defaults (address 3) and while I can program on the main, I also like DecoderPro but it can only read values when on the programming track. So we will either end up getting a PowerPax to be booster to help the programming track, or we will modify the NCE command station to allow more drive to the programming track, that will have to be debated at the next meeting.

Next week I'll be testing the use of the track occupancy detectors we have. They are the standard older 'Optimized Detector' from JLC Enterprises Inc. If they do work well enough the layout has 40 of these for monitoring the mainline. Granted right now only 8 of them are connected to indicators on the CTC panel, that wiring was a project that was never finished, the hardware is there, the lamps are there, but it was never wired from the detectors back to the CTC panel.

March 11 2005

We had our monthly business meeting and looked at the time until the April open house. Reviewing who was available for working on the project between now and the open house it was decided that we couldn't have the layout and members ready to run the open house in DCC mode. While the critical parts of the layout could be operational by then, most of the members would not have had enough time using it to feel ready for the open house. That and all the general cleaning and fixing that we want to do just doesn't leave us with the time to get the DCC right.

Ken made a presentation about DecoderPro and why the club will want to have a computer attached to the command station. At first there was a lot of doubt that it would be needed. But on learning the fact that there are many parts of the DecoderPro program that you can use or ignore (the what parts to skip was more important) it was better received. The primary use will be for inventorying the decoder configurations and roster management, some of the diagnostics and command station functions may get some use too. Much later features dealing with locomotive and turnout control may be integrated but not in phases one or two, possibly with the block signaling in phase 3.

Instead it was decided that Ken would use the next two work nights to run phase one testing of the layout with DCC. The rest of the members would focus on general cleaning and finishing the removal of the old water of Wolcott Bay in preparation for lowering the lake level and generally reworking the Wolcott Bay yard.

At 9:48 PM 11 March 2005 the Delaware & Ontario had it's first DCC train movement. The a train ran around the complete mainline loop. Only two turnouts showed any problems (both at Stamford) and both were either dirty points or not enough point pressure from the turnout control. I used Brian's sound equipped steam engine to make the initial run. The sound would make it easier to spot problem areas like inside tunnels and other minor glitches. After that making a complete circuit of the track in both directions I then switched to the club engine D&H 753, a six axle diesel locomotive recently converted to DCC, and did the same loop in both directions.

To set up for this test I went around to each power pack feeding the track and labeled each wire first, and then removed both wires from each pack. The need to have everything labeled is that I have to reconnect the DC in two weeks so we can get ready for the open house.

Then I took the command station and connected it to the red buss of our CTC block switch panel. I placed the usual auto tail light into the feed from the command station as an indicator and to limit the current to about 1 to 2 amps max while testing. All mainline blocks were then set to the red cab. As a check of the track I did an ohms check prior to connecting the command station or placing any locomotives on the mainline, it showed open circuit as I expected.

I tested using a ProCab initially and then changed to a Pro04p just to make sure both types of cabs are working. Another test we have to do is configuring all cabs and testing the cab bus with all cabs connected to determine what terminations and additional power may be needed for all our operators

February 25 2005

Brian ran the cab wires, as assembled by Bob and Russ, around the layout. We left a service loop on the wires so if we move the location of the command station around we can insure the in and out are maintained on the UTP panels. The cab wires are all run directly behind the fascia to keep them as far from track wires as possible. Staples are the choice for mounting the cables in areas not expected to need moving. Near yard control panels we are using 'cup hooks' or similar releasable attachments as these wires will have to be moved out of the way as we convert the layout from DC to DCC. They will then return to their original placement.

Ken and Brian tested all wires prior to installation. Once all the cab buss wires were connected we then did a test from end to end to check for other problems. Only one connection needed a little reseating to get complete continuity around the whole layout. Ken then connected the command station to the cab bus and Brian went around to each UTP and confirmed the Procab worked and the clock was updating. Ken had set the fast clock to x25 to make the display update be very frequent.

Ken took the command station home to install the new EPROM and do testing with DecoderPro and set up a computer for the club to use for roster maintenance, decoder programming, and eventually layout control to supplement our CTC control panel.

February 18 2005

Brian installed the cab bus outlet panels around the layout. Currently there are 25 UTP connection panels. We decided to go with the RJ12 type jacks due to the ease of replacement and low cost. Brian and Don had made a bunch of mounting plate from plywood and installed the jacks on them. This allowed for easy mounting to the edge of the layout and simple relocation should we find out our initial guess of where we needed them was needing adjustments.