100% Detectable Rolling Stock

After quite a few months every piece of rolling stock on the layout has two sets of resistor wheels. That's over 600 wheel sets. All of the wheels have been cleaned and that equates to more than 1200 sets of wheels.

New Engine Tracks

Spent the day adding two engine tracks to the south side of Brunswick. This cleared up the coach yard for its' intended purpose. Luckily the programming of the turnout was minimal, since I had those turnouts already put in the system.

I sometimes dabble in G

I used to have a small garden railroad when I was in Alabama and I always wanted this reefer. I couldn't help myself on EBay.

New Building

I thought I would check out this leftover building from the Eno Valley RR. It only has a 4 1/2 inch depth. It will fit in a couple of places so I'll keep it.

Full Steam Ahead

Mike Pennie stopped by today and right before he got here everything died. It turns out that the board has issues. I changed out the board and it initialized fine. We started plugging things back in one at a time and things started behaving correctly.

I had prepared a board to act as a local control panel with lights and buttons and that went fine, with everything acting as it was supposed to.

It turns out I had the basic understanding of what to do but the equipment was temporarily messing with me.

I'll spend some time do a few more tests and then I'll be on to bigger challenges. ie. "the layout".

The move to JMRI begins

There has been some discussion about how long I'll be able to stay with the DOS system I'm currently using. Currently I'm using four computers and I have a couple of spares and as long as they work I'll be fine. We all know that things last forever, and at some point the older computers won't be readily available.
I took time over the last month to learn the basics of JMRI. Through a tutorial I successfully drew a track and made a CTC panel. The next step is to make a small test track using at least one of every component that is currently on my layout and get them to work so my understanding will get better before I tackle the full layout.
I built a small test track and installed some of the components needed to start this test. I decided to stick to just the turnouts to keep the complexity down while trying to get the computer to talk to the I/O board.
Yesterday I finally attempted to get the turnouts working and it took all day, but it was successful. It was a combination of many things from learning how to wire the USB-RS485 connector, JMRI lingo, how the "CMRI like" board acted like the true CMRI boards.
The important thing is I got them working and have a much higher understanding of the connections.