Favourite Photos...

Favourite Photos...
Reading Lines GP35 #3647

Middletown, Pa

Friday 23 February 2018

More mainline signals...

So moving right along with the final installs of signals yesterday I installed a triple head mast to the mainline protecting the diamond at Carlislie Junction.

This is a Tomar H861 triple head mast, these come fitted with bi-colour LED's that I remove and replaced with RRCirKits - Tri-Coloured LED's, these provide the true railroad aspect colours of red, yellow & green.


The true aspect colours from the RRCirKits LED's can really be seen well in this photo, no more blowing signals with operators because they look similar now...

The the mainline ahead is routed into track 2 at Shippensburg hence the Approach Medium (Yellow, Green, Red - Aspect), the signal ahead is displaying Medium Approach Medium (Red, Yellow, Green - Aspect).



The addition of operating signals on your layout is a big undertaking, can be costly and time consuming.  But when operating and automated like this brings a whole new experience to operations on your layout...

Jas.

Thursday 15 February 2018

First of the final three signal bridges installed...

So today I finished the first of the final three signal bridges to be installed on the layout.

The new tri-coloured LED's with the pre-wired magnet wire has made the install and hiding all three sets of four wires (12 in total) much easier than the last batch.


The smaller magnet wire has allowed me to hide the 12 wires into a single piece of 1.5mm heat shrink tube.  This is then secured to the bridge via wrapping wire.


The bridge was installed and programmed into JMRI & Panel Pro and is working...


Again the greatest feature of the RRCirKits Tri - Coloured LED's are the best aspect colours I have seen anywhere, true Railroad Red, Yellow & Green.


Jas...

Wednesday 14 February 2018

Into the home stretch for the signals install...

Today I started the building of the last three signal bridges for the layout.  This is the home stretch for the signal install, each of the IHC bridges has one - three head mast on each.


I'm also using RRCirKits - Tri Coloured LED's for these, this batch have the magnet wire pre-wired to the LED and and are not mounted to the old 3mm - 1/8" PCB like before.



These pre-wired versions make wiring extremely easy and have cut the build time per signal bridge in half.  Once completed they will be wired into the layout & programmed into JMRI - Panel Pro.

Jas...

Latest LokSound - Select Direct install...

Finished off my latest LokSound conversion today. A Select Direct decoder with a sugar cube speaker in a Proto 2000 RDG GP30, this is the newer version GP30.

Fairly straight forward install, the decoder fits into the space provided with the OEM light board which was completely removed, the speaker fit between the decoder and the housing for the speaker on the sound version.

All connections were hard-wired to the Select Direct.


The newer version GP30 has all LED’s including lit number boards. These were hard-wired to the aux function buttons and programmed via the LokProgrammer.
Jas...