In the weeks since I have posted, I hooked up the sawmill area to DC and ran some trains. I did have a short when one switch was thrown in one direction, but I quickly found where a had the wrong wires connected to each other; and the saw mill area ran well on DC.
Once I knew it was working on DC, I disconnected the DC, and hooked it up to the main buss for the DCC. after that is is working as expected, so the sawmill area in on lone.
Since then I have been cutting material to fill in the holes between the cookie cutter road bed in preparation for some basic scenery in front of the rear track. Behind the rear track, we are not doing anything yet, cause if we rebuild the upper deck as planned to provide a better approach to the Montegle/ Altimont area, We will be able to make the sawmill scene deeper.
The first picture shows the main line , the company store, and the track into the sawmill complex. the track with the log cars on it leads to the company store and some warehouses. the track parallel to it at the back of the scene leads to the lumber loading area.
the second photo shows the bridge where the mainline crosses the log pond. Note the other bridge over the log pond, temporally propped up with scrap lumber. that bridge leads to a crossing across the main line and then to Patterson #1, the smallest of the H. E. Patterson Goal and Lumber company's 3 mines. the track over by the level will lead to a hidden storrage area where empty log cars can be stored, or full log trains can be moved to get them out of the way of trains switching the mine.
The third photo shows Patterson #1, an AHM old time coal mine, and J. E. Patterson Coal & Lumber Co. # 43 a Proto 2000 USRA 0-6-0 with DCC and sound. It ate my train budget for an entire year, but is was well worth it, as it looks and sounds great, and is the best behaved locomotive on the club layout.
I still have some rough spots to iron out on the handlaid switches,
I was taught to build the switch without guard rails, and to run it for a while without guard rails, tweaking it to be as reliable as possible, before adding guard rails, as guard rails can mask some problems with switch geometry. In any case the handlaid track is close to done here, so I am thinking about what to do next. Perhaps a passenger station near the big yard.
Bill Nelson