Sunday, August 15, 2010

Frustration!!!!

Did not have a good day today on the layout.  Decided to spend some time this morning instaling a six light signal bridge in Rochelle.  For some reason, these signals had three wires which were identical to each other.  All the other signals have a silver wire for ground and two copper wires for the red and green LED.  Makes it a cinch to hook up correctly.  Not these, I had no idea which one was the ground and had to figure it out by trial and error.  And, since the lights are aboove the layout and the wires are below the layout, it meant a lot of getting up and down to check to see if I found the ground wire.  To add to my frustration, it turns out that three of the six lights have the red LED not working correctly for some reason or other.  Now, looking at the picture below, I've come to the conclusion that this bridge won't work anyway since the prototype spans all three tracks and no just the two mainline tracks.  The third track is the interchange track.  Was not that noticable on the Rochelle Sub as I did not have the third track in place.  Now that the third track is there, the bridge just looks wrong to me.  So,  I may have to scrap this bridge all together and start fresh.  Although I may try to reuse parts of it in building a new one to span all three tracks and, of course, have all the lights working.  Luckily it was really nice outside so I felt much better after bike riding with my wife and grilling out some brats for supper.

2 comments:

  1. Yikes! I know the schoolkids can be challenging at times, but grilling them?! Is that allowed? Sorry...British humour (brats are troublesome kids over here)

    See what you mean about the signal bridge - will definitely look better being over 3 tracks...

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  2. I have a couple of NJI bridges on order that I will be splicing into one three track bridge. Will end up costing a bit more, but it will be worth it.

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