More Work On The Florida Layout

Greetings followers of the Atlantic Pacific Railroad and my blog.

I've been down in Florida for a number of days, spending time with the wife, relaxing, and of course working on the layout. 

I've completed about 95% of the track on the lower level. The remaining areas are the two industries, and the track leading to the track where an engine will go to be repaired and a rip track for freight cars. The tracks for the passenger trains are now in place. On the upper level, I've added the cork roadbed for the passenger line with the exception of the run around track next to the end of the station track. 

I had tested some of the tracks, as posted on an earlier blog here attaching alligator clips to the tracks. Since I'm getting ready to leave in a few days to go back north for a week, I decided that I need to plan the wiring for the railroad. The lower level will be divided as follows. The helix tracks will be under it's own district. The freight yard including the area where I will have the turntable, will be another district. The turntable itself will be on an auto reverser. The rest of the lower level will be a separate district. Each district will have its own circuit breaker. Once I get the upper level tracks in place, I'll decide how to break that up. Like DC, I use insulated rail joiners to separate the districts. 

This layout, like the NJ layout will be run by an NCE DCC Powerhouse Pro Radio 5 AMP system. This is a system where your cab controls don't have to be connected to the layout, or cab buss, as it's called. 

Using the wireless feature, I can walk freely around the room. Also, when others operate the layout with me, they don't have to worry about cords dangling or walking around them. 

Today I added 6 drops to the yard. I'm using 20GA solid wire. I could have used 22GA, but I had plenty of this. All of the wires get soldered to the rails. The rest of them will be added once I put in the turntable, and decide where my program track will be located. I may put it next to the turntable. 

Once I get the drops in place, below this area is a terminal strip where all of the wires will be attached. From there, a 14GA stranded wire will go from the systems main terminal strip to each terminal strip on both levels. In between the base and terminal strip will be a circuit breaker. 

The NCE EB1 Circuit breaker will protect each section of the layout. If a short occurs, only the section it protects will stop working, not the rest of the layout. I will be setting these for a 5 AMP trip. The engines without sound don't draw much, and sound engines do draw more. Right now I have one engine with sound down here. 

I added more drops to the rest of the lower level. Those will be soldered in the next day or so. Once in place, I'll test the layout with the engine and box car. I'll be able to test all of the lower level tracks.

I would have started the soldering process tonight, but my index finger ran into the wire stripper. The wire stripper won, so I called it a night. 

Thanks for reading and following the build!