2009: Building 6 New Modules (2 of 2)
Having finished their physical construction, the next step was undercoating the new modules and sky boards ...
... and painting the legs, and front edge brown. We also painted the back of each sky board brown.
Then we installed wiring busses. Following the S-MOD standard, wiring for the mainline tracks is on the visitor (north) side of the module. We created our own standard for auxiliary wiring on the club (south) side.
Preparing to lay roadbed for the rail yard, we set up the five modules and snapped a chalk line for each track.
Roland and Mike carefully align the roadbed to the chalk line and glue it down with Liquid Nails.
We used whatever was heavy to weight it down while the glue dried.
Before long, all the roadbed was in place except that for the turnouts. We did one and concluded that it was best to wait until we had the turnouts in hand so we could make sure it was right rather than trying to speculate ahead of time.
Next we set up the five rail yard modules plus Alex's and Mike connected their mainline bus wires.
When they were all together, Mike did a continuity check.
As we cut track to length for laying, Alex soldered on track connectors and wires for the power feed.
When the turnouts arrived, Peter started converting the ice house module into the west end of the rail yard.
We found that after modules have been clamped together for running, the painted ends stick together. Here Roland removes paint from one of the converted rail yard modules and smooths out irregularities that caused it not to fit correctly with the adjacent module.
With preparations and adjustments complete, we started laying track for the rail yard. We're on schedule to run the new modules at the December train show!
It is beginning to look like a rail yard!
Raulf measures to determine the size of the next piece of track needed ...
... and Peter uses the Dreml tool to prepare it.
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