That's right. . . a train moved under its own power for the first time. That may not seem like much, but it's a big moment. In less than four months, with the help of three talented friends, I have gone from an empty room to an operating layout!
On Tuesday the 4th, George and Dan came up to teach me how to wire the layout for DCC (digital command control). Here they are hard at work:
Unfortunately, wiring involves awkwardly standing on tiptoes (Dan) or
crouching under the benchwork (George).
After discovering that I had used a defective turnout (switch) that was causing a short throughout the layout, we finally got trains moving by midday Wednesday the 5th. Troubleshooting a layout can be frustrating!
George checks wiring under the layout.
George also had a surprise-- a Wisconsin Central snowplow he had custom painted for me. When Walthers made these years ago, I didn't know I'd end up modeling the WC/CN. Back then I was living in Madison and had never even seen the Valley Line or visited Wausau. Now WC plows are hard to find, so George took an extra plow Nate had and painted it WC and added details not found on the original Walthers model. Here's a photo:
Today I've been making sure all my DCC engines work properly on the layout and I've begun to troubleshoot the trackwork. In order to do that, I built a small freight typical of locals one might see in Wausau and ran it through the various yard tracks and around the whole loop. A train traveling the entire loop covers approximately a mile in N scale. This train made 25 loops without a derailment. Here it passes by the yard office and enters the north end of the yard.
I'll be working on the layout over winter break and I hope to begin putting in the staging yard. I'll update more often, at least for the next few weeks. My thanks again to George, Dan, and Nate.
