First Run

I added a power bus, made of 14 gauge speaker wire, around the train table yesterday. Many of the track sections had already been wired with feeders, and I connected them to the bus through elegant crimped connections.

I had decided to get my layout started using a Bachmann EZ Command DCC controller borrowed from my son's HO train set. I used a spare wire that came with the commander. To my confusion, the wire, which looked suspiciously like a 3.5mm headphone jack and wire, contained three wires inside the sheath, not the two I was expecting to find. I don't know what the third wire is used for, if anything, but I quickly identified the correct pair of wires using my digital multimeter and connected those wires to the bus. My multimeter does not have RMS functionality, and looks like the straight AC voltage associated with DCC comes to about 19 volts, which for a sinusoidal wave should come to about the correct RMS voltage for DCC, around 14 volts.

Hands trembling, I put my only DCC-equipped loco, a Bachmann Spectrum GE 44-ton switcher, on the tracks in the part that had feeder wires connected, selected DCC channel 3 and - nothing. I tried on a Kato DC loco that I was yet to equip with a DCC decoder and put it on the tracks instead, using EZ Commander channel 10 which is used to control DC locos. I heard very loud buzzing with the loco standing still, but the loco did respond to the dial, jolted forward, but stopped abruptly after the first turnout.

I first thought something had gone wrong and that I had fried the loco, perhaps by feeding too much voltage to the tracks (perhaps that 19 volts was RMS after all?). After some investigation, consisting of probing the tracks with my multimeter, I realized that my Micro Engineering turnouts acted as isolators. As a result, I had to add feeder wires to a few places that were isolated by turnouts and that were not served by my existing feeders. What a relief!

I added a couple more feeders to the bus and tried again using my DCC equipped switcher. The results were erratic. The train run for a few inches or a foot, but then stopped. It seemed to help if I pushed it along, and it zipped to life again, only to halt again after a short run. After some testing I ruled out a problem with the loco, and discovered that the spots on the track where the train stopped were stained by glue residue from gluing the track to the trackbed. I tried to remove some of the glue with my fingernail and lo and behold, the train managed to get past those spots, although stuttering a little at slower speeds.

I also discovered that I had probably added too many feeder wires to the mainline. I got a steady 19+ volt reading on all parts of the track no matter how close the feeders were. No harm done, though, and a bit of redundancy cannot hurt in this department.

After celebrating by running my small loco back and forth on the finished track section a few times, I created a work plan for finishing the track. This consisted of a few items:

• Lay the rest of the track (I have a new shipment of flex-track coming later this week as I ran out)
• Add a few feeders to track sections that are currently isolated by turnouts. I need to dig a few tunnels through the base layer foam sheet to accomplish this in a couple of places, but no biggie
• Figure out a way to gently clean the existing tracks from glue, perhaps with some warm water or rubbing alcohol
• Try to avoid getting glue on the tracks going forward (not sure how I do this though!)