Let’s Hide Some Wires

After waiting for my wife to arrive home from work last night (I wanted to show her a test run) it was time to start and hide some of the wiring. The track was traced with pencil (good thing I went with the light brown paint, the pencil marks were very easy to see) and I commenced on drilling some holes under the track. Below each of the turnouts needed a hole, and I needed 5 more holes for the power feeds. I have 4 power feeds under the double crossing and 1 more across on the other side.

Once I fed all the wiring through the holes, I also began to secure the track to the trackboard with screws. My plan with this layout is to be able to move it off the bar if the need arises.

As of right now, I am quite happy on how it is turning out.

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METX #163 EMD F40PH Locomotive

First off, Merry Christmas to everyone... When I first wanted to get (back) into Model Railroading, the one locomotive that I knew I really wanted was a Chicago Metra locomotive. Growing up on the West Line and riding the Metra into the city, I always loved this locomotive. So last night on Christmas Eve, my youngest child, wife and I opened presents. To my behold, my wife got me a KATO EMD F40PH in the Chicago Matra liverly along with it being the “City of Elmhurst”, Elmhurst is the suburb I grew up right next to on the West Line. Since I knew I wanted one for my collection, I already had a TSC DCC K5D7 decoder ready for it, so this morning I followed the directions and got the decoder soldered into the locomotive and then programmed on my layout. It really is a Merry Christmas!

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Starting The Benchwork

I am not much of a woodworker and I knew cutting plywood and 1x4’s with my limited tools would be very tedious. So I needed to come up with another way to build my benchwork. I remembered back to one of my previous layout attempts and that I purchased a hollow door from store. That door back then was only 30” wide so I needed to see if could find one that is 36” wide. Sure enough my local Home Depot sells 36”Wx80”L for around $38.00, I thought that would work perfect and save me some time. So now the trackboard is set and I needed to think how I was going to wire the layout. Having the board sit right on top of the bar would not allow me to do my wiring underneath the board. I decided to purchase a 1x4 abd cut 4” blocks to use as legs. I figure the blocks just being used as legs my cuts do not have to be perfectly straight, a jigsaw would work. My next issue is my bar top is made of tile. I thought the wood block would probably easi...

Coloma Rails - N Scale Model Railroading

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