Planning For The New Staging

I'm doing a little planning for the staging expansion. I have laid out the track in 2", 2 1/4" and 2 1/2" track spacing. I'm hoping for 12 tracks with the outside two tracks mostly to help with restaging. I'm trying to keep the foreground  to under 16",  for ease in getting to the tracks.  It has to go around a corner to get the mainline. 

I usually use 2" centers to keep the space narrower. This has never been a problem for me. However, with the extra tracks I thought I'd take a look.

In all cases the throat used about 4' and about another 8" to straight track.

The first picture shows a track spacing of 2". The table with of 26"

This picture shows 2 1/2" spacing, a 31" table width and a change to a straight Turnout at the beginning. The curve around the corner is a little tighter and the outside tracks to the turnout is also tighter.

This picture is 2 1/4" track spacing and back to a curved turnout.

Making resistor wheels with wire glue

Video on making resistor wheels.

Contemplating A Name Change

Almost 25 years ago I came up with the Blue Ridge & White Mountain Railroad. It was based on a generic idea to make my railroad both Southern and Northern just by changing the locomotives and rolling stock. Needless to say I am all into Maine and the Southern part never materialized. If I had picked a mountain route instead of a coastal route things might have been different.

Many years ago I debated a change of the railroads name to make it more related to Maine. I am not a real good change artist. I had a hard time changing to code 83 from code 100. Now that I'm changing control systems and computer controls and the change bug is here I started thinking about the name change. Here is a listing of some ideas.

Casco Bay Northern - this bay is at Portland the southern most point of the railroad.

I have played with the idea of using my initials CMB

Central Maine and Boston

Central Maine and Bangor

Coastal Maine and Boston

Coastal Maine and Bangor

Dispatchers Desk Changes

In anticipation of the extending of the layout, the dispatchers desk needed to be moved. I cleaned out an area near the desk and moved the desk into this spot. The desk also needed to be a little shorter so I cut off a foot of the table top. The length could be shorter with all the old computers gone. 

This is a temporary move so that I can move the other things, like my sprinkler system. I hope to get the desk into the crew lounge at some point.

The dispatcher's desk in its new location.

The fast clock could no longer be attached to the benchwork so I put it in a scrap of beadboard.

Digitrax to NCE

Throughout the years I have had trouble with the Digitrax system. Mostly the radio portion. I never could seem to get a good signal every where. I have recently have had problems with the 9v batteries. This isn't Digitrax related, but my batteries were going bad on the charger.

I had been thinking of moving to NCE based on other layouts in the area also moving to NCE and having their problems disappear.

I had been in contact with Tony's Train Exchange, they were having a sale so I took the plunge. Sometime this month I'll be changing out the two systems and selling off all the Digitrax.

DOS to JMRI

About a year and a half ago my Electrical Guru and I were talking about the availability of the older computers which were getting harder to find. I had extras for the moment but over time as they fail if I didn't have a backup plan my Op Sessions could come to a halt.

I decided to learn JMRI and gave myself a two year window to get it working. Better to swap control systems on my terms and not the electronics. Not only did I have to learn JMRI, I had to learn how CMRI worked. My boards were developed by my Guru to emulate CMRI, so I had learn how these boards emulated CMRI. Once that was done then I could get underway.

July was when the official full scale testing was started and in August we were using JMRI for the Op Sessions. Shortly after that all the old DOS computers and monitors were removed and discarded.

The dispatchers really like the new screens. It seems to be much easier to pick up and understand.

The best news is the file that is used will work on both the MAC and the Windows computer.

Enlarging the layout

Right now I have an eight track, double ended staging yard connected to a 2 track town by a reverse loop. This is duplicated right above it on the upper level.

A while back I decided to take the staging yard and straighten it out into a stand up crawl space and turn the two towns into larger towns with industry. This will enable me to narrow the benchwork by about six inches.

The staging will have more tracks to allow me to have more trains and the ability to stage special trains. The track will be longer which will help when trains sometimes are longer than planned.

I will be able to build these before ever connecting to the existing layout, so operations should not be affected.

This will add about 30 more feet of mainline to both ends of the layout. There will be roughly 7 new industries added to the existing towns. Of course, this is only a guess at this time.