You know your doing blocks, turnouts & signals when your layout looks like this...

One of the critical tasks when installing a detection & signaling system is to record all of your blocks, turnouts & signal masts.  Luckily I have few people who have tread this path before and have helped out with some great advice and spreadsheets to record it all.

Today was a consolidation day of ensuring that I had all the blocks in the right place, the insulators in the right positions and all the turnouts that are going to be individual blocks both wired and isolated too.

So to start I printed off the spread sheets for the BDL168's and got several packets of white stick on labels.  Special thanks has to go to Brendan Dennis who designed these sheets in Excel and has shared them with us, they contain sheets for the BDL168, SE8C & Signal Heads/Masts.

The labelling convention that I am using is to place a label sticker on the boundary between blocks and label both sides with the common JMRI/Digitrax naming/address convention.  For blocks it is LS & for Turnouts (Switch Machines) it is LT.

In the photo above you can see the RH turnout labelled LS114 on the approach, straight through & diverging routes.  It also has a sticker in the middle for the turnout address and to signify that it is a detected block.

Here is the junction a Harrisburg leading off to White Oak, and as you can see the crossover is it's own detected block, incorporating two turnouts.  Any track leaving a detected section or turnout that is not going to be detected via JMRI is labelled as either "undetected" or U/D.

This should make wiring the blocks underneath the layout and for fault finding later much easier.

Jas...