I managed to get one track of the Altoona staging yard glued down and operational. I must say I'm finding these Peco turnouts to be somewhat difficult to work with in yard situations. For one thing, their design makes it impossible to connect two turnouts together end to end as one would at a yard throat. The throwbar mechanism is simply too wide. This necessitates cutting a whole bunch 3/4" spacers for each turnout. Kind of annoying but survivable. The other difficulty is the powered frogs. They require insulted rail joiners and feeder wires between each turnout. Again, not the end of the world.
Having even just the one staging track makes operation more fun. If I wanted to switch trains on my old layout, I had to physically remove one and store the rolling stock. Now I just throw a couple of turnouts and away I go!
In other news, spring seems to have sprung here in the Palmetto State. After last week's snow, the temperature was a balmy 77 degrees today. As such work on the layout will probably slow down quite a bit. With the arrival the nice weather, there will be trails to hike, lakes to canoe, grass to mow and other fun stuff. Yeah, I'll still come back and tinker with layout every so often, just at a more relaxed pace.
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