Great Northwestern Railway

I am genuinely surprised by how much work is needed to adjust the previous operating plan to this new layout.  Frankly, it would have been easier to start from scratch!  I added about 30% additional cars.  Delightfully, I had stashed quite a few cars over the years (eh-em, owing to more than a few visits to hobby shops), and the balance came out about right.  Still, it was quite an effort to prep the cars, get car-cards made up, and then... the really arduous part... writing up way-bills for each one.  New car cards - written out and folded, ready for taping. All the rolling stock was brought up to the main yard or just above it.  This allowed me to muse on how each car would fit into the traffic scheme. A lot more cars here than it would appear! Locos and cabeese also had to get their cards. The next step which is currently under way is the development of a train sequence.  This will let me plan out the flow of trains such that...

A few months ago there was a post on the LCC Groups.IO forum talking about the ability for one of the LCC node I/O points to both act as an INPUT, that is, to accept a push button command, AND act as an output, such as to illuminate an indicating light.  This is super cool!  Why?  Well at an all-in cost of around $3 per I/O point, it's hard to justify a lot of indicating lights on panels.  BUT... if we can get a "free" output for each discrete input, well, that is just like having your cake and eating it too!  (Never totally understood that analogy, but seems fitting.) The way this works is the node runs the I/O point as an output for 63 milliseconds, and then for a few milliseconds, it converts the output to an input where it polls the input.  So if it detects a "low" or a "high" in this window, it creates the appropriate event.  Slick, huh?  Timing at 63 ms is fast enough that even if the PB is just momentarily touched, it is enough to trigger...