FINALLY an Update!
Got back from my Dad's house on Saturday with some great progress photos and videos to share. I've been very busy this week, even though I'm on "vacation". I've been putting in 8hrs a day working on a clients layout, a Marklin HO scale 13'x17' layout. I'll share photos and videos later on a separate thread.
Onto the progress report.
The main project that I worked on this trip was laying out the control panel schematics on the installed fascia areas. The first panel I did was for the main yard. I used 1/4" white pin striping tape for the lines. The fascia was 17" high and I have 14 tracks to lay in. I used 1" centers on the schematic, that left just enough space on the panel at the top for future names and yard tech info.
Here is the start of the panels. These are the 2 main lines with the crossover and station siding. You can see the laser line level I used to get the tape dead on straight. I put dots on each side of the fascia at 1" centers and lined up the laser for perfect lines. easy and worked like a charm.
After a few hours of work, lining up dots, laying tape, cutting 45 degree angles, and cursing a couple times... here's the results.
The right side of the yard near the roundhouse. The black square is the Walther's 90' turntable control. A very nice kit, works perfectly.
Here's a close up of the TT control.
This is the left side of the panel with the yard classification tracks and passenger station area.
We mounted the NCE Power Cab plug-in jack in the space above the yard. For now we have a temporary solution to the throttle holder... VELCRO.
I used graph paper to sketch out the schematic before committing it to the fascia. This gave me a feel for how the tracks would line up on the finished schematic. I think this quick, easy step saved a lot of headaches.
That's all the work that was done on the first day down. We actually had some fun running trains that night. We also found some minor hiccups that we had to fix while running them... doesn't that always happen? I'll have a video of that run in the next post.