Great Northwestern Railway

Slower than desired, but better to do it right now than try to fiddle it in later.... In my last staging yard, I never did install feeders.  Instead I just counted on the continuity of the turnouts to carry power to each of the 16 staging tracks.  Bad idea.  ~Most~ stayed powered up over the 10 or so years it operated.  ~Some~ randomly dropped out... necessitating fishing and soldering wires onto tracks with 7" spacing between decks.  Not uber-fun at all. SO... with GNW Phase 3, I promised myself ALL track would have feeders every 6' (one feeder per 2 sticks of flex), plus additional feeders in any other complex areas such as yard throats.  This would also allow me to have every other stick of flex not have to be soldered at the track jointers, allowing for expansion and contraction of the benchwork.  BUT... this comes at a cost.  Instead of 16 single ended tracks, I elected to have a 9-track staging yard, each track capable of holding 3 trains.  (WHY I ever went to 9 tr

Progress continues, and wanted to share some ideas for those who may care.  Received my first package of LCC components and starting thinking about how to lay out the nodes.  One thing my good friend Dave Cochrun did on his layout was mount the controls onto a board that is easily accessible to wire and maintain.  What a concept!  In the past I attached my control pieces onto the benchwork... which means crawling under the layout for every little thing.  No more!  Cut a couple pieces of plywood 14" x 24" and wa-la, a perfect place to mount components.  I painted them white to give it a little more finished look and feel.  Next to lay out the components.  First step is to figure out what inputs and outputs I have from each part of the layout.  Being a bit of a nerd, I built up a spreadsheet in Excel to assign points.  Really this is important for whatever wiring you may do.  If this step is skipped, you will get lost in sorting it all out in real-time.  Here is a sn