Ferndale Jct. Yard Updates

When we returned from our visit to Maine, I first tackled the second coat of floor paint. Now all of the basement floor under the current benchwork is painted, although not all of the basement floor is painted. I will need to do quite a bit of organizing to get to that stage. My plan is to continue with one section at a time. The workbench and storage area will be quite a procedure to avoid painting around benches and cabinets.

Once the floor paint was dry, I worked on the runaround track. I have explored prepping Peco Electrofrog turnouts here before, My first step was just that, prepping the turnout. To avoid potential kinking, I soldered an extension to a full length of flex track. I also soldered feeders under the rails before fitting the runaround in place. To finalize the wiring of the runaround I also added a piece of track and powered it leading into the turnout.

At that point the next step was to add track to the so-called drop down section. The flextrack that I ordered had arrived right before our trip, so I was ready to proceed. I did have to dig out some ballast and ties at the end of the existing track to fit in joiners, but other than that fiddly work with a hobby knife it all went smoothly. I still will need to solder those joiners for fool proof electrical connection, but they are working for now.

Today I completed the controls for the two turnouts going into the yard from the mainline. I've had the switch machines wired to power appropriate DCC power to the frogs since I installed the tortoises, but I hadn't had the switch motors themselves powered. These two turnouts are controlled by a toggle switch so they both throw together, either both straight into the yard or both "diverging" with the mainline curving to the left and the drill track set out of the yard. Down the road, my intention is to set up interlocking signals for this pair of turnouts.

Now that all the track is in and wired, as I see it my next steps include running some trains and planning my initial operations scenario. I want to make sure that everything is working well before I move on with steps such as scenery.