Progress Little by Little

I have been quietly working over the last month or so on the layout finishing up my river scene with a wooden truss bridge. There is still much to do there, I need more vegetation and need to add trees, but I think I’ll come back later for that. I am working on one of my yards, having just finished all the turnouts and yard ladder as well as the engine service tracks.

All the turnouts are servo activated with accessory decoders on Loconet. These can be controlled via the throttles or using JMRI. The turnouts in other parts of the layout will have small panels with a switch and LED’s showing position. I’m planning to use an Ipad as a control panel for the yards.

This is the JMRI panel for the yard shown above. Only the main line through, the arrival, and the departure track have occupancy detection. I’ve added some buttons to activate routes from the yard lead to each ladder track. I have this working pretty well. I have purchased a half dozen of the Railcrew un-couplers from Rapido and have placed one on the yard lead. I am on my third revision of an accessory decoder to control this. I hope to get this all installed and operational soon. I will add a button on this panel to activate and deactivate it.