Great Northwestern Railway

Yes, it's been quiet on the blog, but work certainly has been happening!  Of note, the C-19 bug allowed for more evenings and weekends at home to tackle a massive project.  Let me explain... The layout is double decked, without a helix to get between the decks.  Well, actually, it is TRIPLE decked at the staging yard, so there IS a helix to get to that from one end.  But there are no helixes between the visible decks.  This was done to allow the operators to really follow their trains from point to point.  But even with a "no-lix" connection, it also means there has to be a transition from where the connection between the lower deck and the upper deck... which means the scenery for some of that run will have to be associated with the lower deck, and then later with the upper deck.  That makes for an interesting scenic transition. The way this is being handled on the GNW is having the lower deck include the first portion of the ramp up in the scenery wi...

LIGHTING Progress has been slow but good on the GNW.  First, added lighting under the deck of the upper to light up the lower.  It was always kind of dark and murky under the upper deck, and it really needed something to brighten things up.  Four 15' strips of LEDs and a new power supply were added and it made a huge difference! Lighting was simply hot-glued under the upper deck.   Compression terminal blocks distributed the power.  Of note, I needed to add power feeds to BOTH ends of each string.  Voltage drop along each string was enough that the LEDs were noticeably dimmer on the far end without.   Here is the new power supply - an Ebay special.  I located it mid-point between the two pairs of LED strips. LED Power Supply Some before/after shots. Looking east before lighting Looking east after lighting. Looking west before lighting Looking west after lighting.  Quite the difference! ...