Well I did. In my defense it has been two years since I last had to spend hours looking for a short, but still! As you can guess I went ahead and wired up all my feeders to the BUS wires and then surprise surprise it no work. Still lacking a memory of shorts I unwired all the feeders and still had a short. After some time with a continuity tester I remembered that the frogs on all Peco Electrofrog turnouts needed to be gapped or insulated. I had done some, but not all. Anyway after using my Dremel cutting wheel to make the missing gaps, all the shorts went away and I can now start again. This time I will test with my RRamp meter after every connection that everything is still OK.

At least I have finished wiring the 40 turnouts to the front of the layout. Now all I have to do is connect a whole load of accessory decoders and design the control panel for the switches and lights. It is already built. Then comes the fun part — coding a NCE Mini Panel.

But first I have to get the track wiring organised and test run some Locos. That should be fun, I hope.

Donkey deep into wiring. I have 40 turnouts installed on just modules 1 & 1a and at least as many blocks requiring feeders and NCE BD-20 block detectors. Once all the block wiring and the accessory decoders are installed I plan to create a control panel with a diagram of the tracks and to install toggle switches and push-buttons to control the routes. The main line routes are going to be set using a NCE Mini Panel. For mainly economic reasons the industrial sidings, that do not require signalling, will use a central CDU (Capacitor Discharge Unit) and a diode matrix if necessary.

The following photos give an indication of where I am at with my wiring. Once finished I can start on building the industry kits and wiring up the temporary oval of track to enable test running and switching operations.