We got up early, drove 350+miles to west Texas to visit Cindy's mom in a nursing home. She kept begging us to send her husband, Jack, to get her and take her home. He died in the summer of 2017. Alzheimer's is a nasty condition.
After about an hour and a half, we left and drove back home. Recovery Friday was a total washout. Today (Saturday, I think?) I was able to work on the modules.
Note the end module on the left. It can't be wired as a "normal" TTrak module in this scenario. The Inside track must be the same polarity as the outside, as it's not "Inside" but rather a passing siding for the "Outer." However, in other setups, it may be a "normal" end module. So, I had to revise the wiring and add a terminal block and wiring to the track. In that way, it could enable the inner track polarity to be reversed, depending on the setup. Not switchable, but swapping connections on the block at setup time. If I just hadn't put the next module in there. I never intended to do so, but it just got in there anyway . . . and it does look good there. Oh, well.
Then, there was a spot that kept bouncing the locos pretty bad. I had missed getting the coupler on the rail properly. Fixed that, and the power feed there, too. I've had an SD-40 (Conrail Blue) and a B-23-7 (UP yellow) running reliable laps for over an hour (one at a time - DC for now, DCC later on the outer loop.) I still need to to the "sweetening" on a pair of Kato #4's to hopefully end the occasional picking-the-points problem.
The inter-connected inner loops seem to have a short somewhere. Since they span four modules, with the special Shorty loops inside them all interconnected, I'm sure it'll be easy to trouble shoot. NOT! I'll spent the rest of the weekend thinking them over, and see what happens next week.
Oh, well, it's a lot closer to being good than ever before, track wise.
S/W Joe
WA5UNK
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