Working on the Railroad

7/24/15
Last Updated: 1/28/16

After much wood working to get to this point, there's still a lot to do before the real "modeling" can begin. The lower deck railroad rails has only been a main focus because I cannot permanently mount the top deck until its ready. Once the top deck is installed the rails will be largely inaccessible. 

For this reason I decided to install wooden round stock as guard rails so if there is ever a problem with the trains, it would be much less likely they would fall to the floor. The rails also needed a base of ballast because I would be difficult to reach in later for scenery.

9/16/15

Once the lower deck rails were installed, I fixed in place the top deck. I drilled and soldered in the feeder wires for the rails before permanently fixing the top deck because access would be impossible in most spots.

After the deck was fastened I started drilling access holes and installing bus wires directly under the lower deck rails. Because of the complex automated control of the module using infrared and other voltage controls I decided against DCC Systems for now. I did however, install the wires (14awg) in a way that would allow one connection and I could run DCC equipment. 

This is the main controler (ArduinoUNO) with a relay shield. Because only one relay was needed for the fairly simple lower deck train controls, I desoldered the other three relays from the Arduino and they will operate in isolation.

10/15/15

After all of this infrastructure for the upper and lower deck rails were completed, next power supply had to be installed. Because I wanted the trains isolated from main power supply for voltage drop reasons I decided to just use a stand alone MRC 15V transformer. For main power I am using a PC 450 watt power supply.

10/21/15

After everything was connected to AC power in via a MRC1300 transformer and had some trouble I found the coil was faulty and it was replaced with an old Aurora 14v DC powerpack as a temporary solution to keeping the project moving forward.