On the 19th, with the staging yard basically built and waiting on components for the control panel rebuild, I turned my attention to the BLI Blueline loco that had the bad sound board.
Here's the original decoders in the tender. The motor decoder is the small piece with all the wires that's hanging behind the tender.
Here I've removed the old electronics (the board is sitting above the tender). Only the speakers will be reused.
By the next day the new TCS decoder had been fully wired in. All that was left was to fit the tender shell over everything.
In this shot the locomotive is sitting on the turntable with the tender shell off. The wires aren't real neat, but the shell fits and everything works great.
At this point I had to get ready for the June 25th Operating Session. The room was a mess, and a lot of stuff was piled on the layout from all the staging yard construction. It took me two full days to get the room and layout cleaned up:
I spent a couple more days building train manifests in JMRI and making sure everything was in place on the layout. This time around I blocked both the incoming trains and the yards themselves, so the operators wouldn't have to hunt and pick cars one or two at a time. Then the big day came! For this operating session, Kurt, foreground, is handling the Casper local switcher while Bill is acting as Casper yardmaster. They made a pretty effective team! Casper wasn't the bottleneck it had been during the March session.
After the session was over I decided to take a break from the staging yard for another week or two, and instead started extending the skyboard from Thermopolis to Worland. Here, on the 28th of June, I've added the mounting strips for the styrene sheets on the walls bounding Holly Sugar.
On the 29th I had the new sheets of styrene attached.
By July 1st I was well along with the support posts for the backdrop that will separate Worland from Basin.
On the 4th I added the first section of skyboard behind Worland on the peninsula itself.
And two days later I had the second sheet mounted.
On the 7th I cut, stacked and drilled out the acrylic panels for the new staging yard control panel.
I spent a couple days removing the Milwaukee Road lettering from a Blueline Mikado, re-lettered the tender, then took several days off for a variety of medical tests. Then I got busy wiring the staging control panel. First I began adding leads to the bi-color occupancy indicator LEDs.
After installing the green leads on all the LEDs I set them aside and began wiring the route selection switches LED wiring.
Yesterday I began wiring the Tortoise leads to the switches for east staging. I still have to attach the power supply lines to the switches.
By the 26th of July I had the route selection indicators (blue LEDs) wired along with the power pilot lights (green LEDs). I hooked up a temporary power supply to the LEDs and tested to make sure I had the route selections correct.
After that first test was done I continued wiring the back of the panel. By July 29th I had all the components wired, though nothing was connected to the yard yet.
Here's a shot of the east staging yard throat under Casper. I'm going to have to zip-tie those wires to make sure they don't get in the way of the trains!
By the 7th, after spending nearly a week wiring the panel into the staging yard, it was finally done. It's kinda messy, but everything works.
On the 9th I finally finished wrapping up all the cables and setting everything in place on the rolling panel stand. Here's the front:
And here's the back.
Also on the 9th I began exhaustively testing the now-completed staging yard, running trains both directions into and through the yard. I'm making notes as I go, cataloging locomotive capacities into and out of staging and such.
In this view under Casper, you can see a train in the distance. This yard is long!
Two trains sitting at the west end of the yard awaiting their turns to appear on the layout.
Testing isn't complete yet - it'll take a couple weeks of off-and-on work to complete that. I'm also planning on adding a camera or two to the yard - even with the occupancy detectors a camera pointed at the west yard throat will be a big help to the staging yard operator.
I'm also going to do some tweaks to the panel stand.
With the yard basically functional, I switched gears today and removed the rest of the lettering on the first Blueline Milwaukee Mikado. In this shot, all the lettering is removed except the writing on the aft air reservoir.
And here's the cleaned-off loco. I'll paint out the numbers on the number boards. They're too small to remove without damaging the finish and possibly some of the detailing in that area.
On the 13th of August Dave came down from Basin. We spent the morning visiting Chuck Eckerson, a retired employee of the Burlington here in Casper, then in the afternoon we installed the end section of backdrop on the Worland / Basin Peninsula.
Here Dave is inside the access hole in the benchwork preparing to mount the backdrop.
By that evening we had that section completely installed, except for a brace on the end upright. The backdrop now curves back on itself to begin the backdrop for Basin.
Over the next few days I worked on re-lettering Milwaukee Mikado 330 and preparing some tank cars for the layout, including the Tangent cars I bought at the Cheyenne train show on the 30th of June. I was rather dismayed at the condition of those new Tangent cars when I removed them from the box - three of the four had damage or were missing parts! Not what I expected for over $45 per car.
I contacted Tangent asking for replacement parts, and they said they would send me a whole new car I could cannibalize for the parts I needed. That was great, but I would have preferred cars that were not flawed in some way to begin with.
Here's the damage on one of the cars. When I took it out of the box a stirrup step looked like this:
I managed to repair it, but in preparing the cars for the layout (Kadee sprung trucks, which forced me to change the couplers to overset shank ones for the coupler height to be anywhere near correct) parts kept falling off! Coupler pockets were partially glued in place, though they weren't supposed to be. Rushed assembly, it appears.
These cars look great and are loaded with detail, but I'm not at all confident they'll hold up under regular use. I think the Proto 2000 kits are the best compromise between detail and durability. I don't buy many RTR cars, and this experience has strengthened my decision to stay with kits.
I'll get the weathering complete on two or three of the Tangent cars today.
Over the last week I've also spent quite a bit of time testing the staging yard. Everything seems to be working well.
I bought a backup camera kit off Amazon and installed it at the west yard throat. Here the monitor is just sitting on the control panel while I test it out.
It works really well, but the 4.3" monitor is too small. I bought a system with a 7" monitor and tried it out. The monitor size is a great improvement, but I returned that system because the image quality wasn't very good - dark and light waves flowed down the screen. I have a new system arriving today, so maybe that will work out better.
The last couple of days I've begun installing the turntable in Thermopolis. Here I've got the frame cut out and installed:
And here the turntable is set in place. It isn't attached yet; just set in place to see how it all fits. Over the next few days I'll remove the turnout from near Himes Curve and reinstall it off the mainline in Thermopolis, just behind the turnout closest to the camera.
I also completed re-lettering that Milwaukee Mikado yesterday. Here it's reassembled and sitting on the mainline at Casper. 5513 was one of the O4 Mikados the Burlington had assigned to the Casper Division in 1935.
After working with the 4.3" monitor for staging for a short period of time, it became obvious that the monitor was just too small to use. I ordered a different system that had a 7" monitor, but the image on that one was terrible. I returned it and ordered from yet another company.
That one tested out okay. The larger screen works much better, so I installed it on the layout fascia.
I liked that system enough to order a second one to look at the middle of the staging yard, at the occupancy detectors there. Here's the camera, all prepared for installation under Casper.
Here's the final arrangement of the control station for the staging yard. The monitor to the left looks at the west end yard throat, the one on the left side of the control panel. The other monitor looks at the center of the yard. The east yard throat is visible to the staging yard operator, so there's no need for a camera there.
Near the end of August I finished repairing and weathering the four Tangent tank cars. Here they are sitting in Casper.
I also added three other cars to the layout in August - A silver molasses car for Holly Sugar plus two CNW boxcars. Here's the whole string of seven cars, tacked on behind the ex-Milwaukee Mikado I recently re-identified as CB&Q #5513.
In late August I finished laying the lead to the Thermopolis turntable.
With the turntable installed, I decided to work on the fascia leading from the Wind River Canyon into Thermopolis. First I had to prep the area for the new fascia panel, adding a splice at the adjacent panel and a 2X4 to guide the fascia around the new turntable. The untrimmed fascia sheet is sitting on the floor at the bottom of this picture.
A couple days ago I rough trimmed the new panel and installed it on the layout.
After taking this photo, I retrimmed the new panel to match the ground level in Thermopolis, then trimmed the fascia panel in the near foreground.
The last couple of days I've been painting the fascia. Here's one of the large panels at the end of the Wind River Canyon / Thermopolis peninsula. After drying for a few days they'll be reinstalled, along with the new Thermopolis panel after it's painted.