Model Railroading > Wiring & electronics, the ugly underbelly of my EBI

After five years, the wiring on my fictional East Bay Industrial is ninety nine percent done. The EBI is a modest sized double track loop built for continuous running and walk around switching operations. It is based on a short line taking over switching on the Hayward line area in the south east corner of San Francisco Bay in the early to mid nineties. Lots of possibilities here including the SP, UP, SF, Amtrak, and NCRy museum operations. The layout runs along the walls of three bonus rooms in a attic space which gets a little too warm in the summer.

Anyways, seldom discussed here is wiring and electronics, the heart of a model railroad, so I thought I'd post a few pictures of my modest efforts.

My DCC system base is a MRC Prodigy that I sent in and had it updated to run wireless. The base sends its signals to two CVP 7 amp Zonemaster boosters. The Boosters in turn power one CVP Zoneshare each. These are basically a Gang of Four circuit breakers that divide the layout into eight districts.

Each mainline loop and yard area has its own 14 gauge bus. The bus wires are white and black for simplicity and are solid copper. Feeders are 18 gauge stranded that I use Scothlok #560 suitcase connectors to connect with the bus. Because the feeder wire is stranded, it can be paired down to a much smaller gauge when soldered to the rail. Many of my siding, yard and staging tracks use toggle switches for isolation. This is very useful if you have lots of sound equipped locomotives on the layout at the same time.

The MRC wireless system works beautifully from any room I'm in and the CVP products work great as well. Very happy with this set up. JMRI is now supporting MRC if I choose to go that route in the future.

The last year has been spent running everything hard and correcting defects. One area that became a real issue was unpowered frogs. Most of my turnouts are Micro Engineering # 6's and Walthers # 8's . My four axle units just would die often enough to drive me crazy. Enter Tam Valley Hex Frog Juicers to the rescue!

Here are some views.

I would love to see what others are doing in this area!

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Some more...

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Very nice job on the wiring. Most MRs look like a rats nest.

Scott Schifer
Torrance, CA
TinyTrains Website

Looks very nice.

A rats nest is what the California Southern MRRC cut out of it's HO layout in 2008 when we converted from 6 color mainline DC block control to Digitrax Super Chief DCC.

First, a photo of the copper wire removed from the old color blocks.
Second, an example of one of the layout's (6) DB150 5 amp booster shelves with 4 power busses extending off to power every inch of rail.

Mr. MRL

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Nice to see someone else using the MRC prodigy wireless. Personally I think its a great system, customer service is excellent, programming is intuitive, and everything works really smoothly. Very easy to put this throttle into the hands of a visitor and have them operating in seconds. Nice looking benchwork you got there too, like those brackets.

You should get the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval for that nice housekeeping underneath. Neatly done . You want to see a rats nest you should have seen the patch boards we used at the naval flight test facility and it changed on a daily basis based on the equipment , mainframes and facilities being utilized. . Loved those patching diagrams every day.

Show off! It doesnt look ugly at all. You want to see ugly, wait until mine is finished. But I'm not going for a photo finish, just something that does the job! Hah hah!

Cheers, Jim Fitch

MrMRL, Beautiful! Who ever designed that booster self has spent many, many hours troubleshooting in the past I bet.

Chris



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/22/14 07:29 by ChrisCampi.

Yup, its top notch wiring. Benchwork looks just as sharp! Keep posting pics on layout progress!

Javier Cervantes
Castle Rock , CO

Finderskeepers Wrote:
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> Nice to see someone else using the MRC prodigy
> wireless. Personally I think its a great system,
> customer service is excellent, programming is
> intuitive, and everything works really smoothly.
> Very easy to put this throttle into the hands of a
> visitor and have them operating in seconds. Nice
> looking benchwork you got there too, like those
> brackets.

After two of us worked on my in progress DCC NCE layout trying to get things working am glad that someone has good customer support. Love it now that I figured out not to take the old recopied instructions that are kind of too basic and assumes too much things started to work. It started with trying to program switch machines, read it step by step, didn't work after the don't know how many times I tried something else that the instructions said but down quite a ways and went against what was written. I took off the jumper wire and all was well. Problem solved but was not written properly so figured that you removed the jumper later after proving it worked. Was on the phone with the tech later and brought up the problem, he said let me take you thru it step by step,yup caught him on that as he said, now it should work. Well it didn't and told him about the problem with the instructions went right over his head. Oh well.