Well hello there! I know, it's been forever since I've posted. But I've been working on the layout in fits and starts. As you can see from the above photo, I've gotten most of the Altoona yard tracks ballasted and am starting to apply ground cover.
My most recent project involved my turnouts, chiefly, the double crossovers at each end of the layout. My trains were consistently stalling on them. Nothing kills my enthusiasm faster than balky trains, so I finally attacked the problem.
The Achilles heal of these Peco Electro Frog turnouts is their reliance on the points to ferry current to the rest of the turnout. If you point rails don't make perfect contact with the stock rails, your turnout becomes a dead spot. Painting the rails and ballasting, no matter how careful I am, tend to gum these turnouts up.
It took a few hours of careful cleaning with Goof Off and tweaking, but now my trains run around flawlessly. It was well worth the effort.
The main fruit of my labors was being able to teach my son Victor to run the trains with the DCC throttle. Talk about a proud papa moment!
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