Before you can program a decoder…

Now that #10 seems to be running as well as I can make it mechanically, it’s time to stop running it under address 3. Okay, where’s the programming track? The truth is, there isn’t one yet. Being in a bit of a rush to make things run, and because it’s a little inconvenient to access […]

Turntable wiring made simple

Turntables obviously need to reverse polarity of their rails. In the bad old days, people used to use all sorts of tricks to switch the polarity. One could use a split ring rail and opposing wipers, or a manual switch with DCC, but in either case, the engine sound will cut out briefly. It’s much […]

The feeder tool

I was over to my friend, Scott Calvert’s last night. His new Boundary Subdivision is almost the exact opposite of Pembroke. Where Pembroke is small, the Boundary is huge. Where Pembroke is set in 1905, the Boundary is firmly in the diesel era. I seem to be spending my Boundary evenings on installing feeders – […]

Wiring the Staging Yard

Andrew came over last Wednesday, and glued down most of the rest of the rail in the staging yard. I followed him with the soldering iron and wire strippers and added feeders to all the rails. Some of the wiring trenches got pretty crowded, but I only had to carve one a little wider to […]

North Section Wired

By gum, but it’s cold out there! The garage where Pembroke is under construction is not heated, except by a tiny little plug-in fan heater; it’s got about the same thermal capacity as my wife’s hair dryer, which is to say, it doesn’t make much of a dent in the -8 Celsius that we are […]

Wiring up the South Section

Tonight I soldered all the feeders to the bus wires. The frog feeders are still hanging loose, but all those stock rails are fed now. It is singularly uninteresting from a visual standpoint, and the photo came out blurry; so the photo below shows something else. Working from above, it has been easy to forget […]