This afternoon, I invited a bunch of good friends, Andrew, Scott, Ken, Julian as well as Margot and Patty over to help install the layout in the basement. I wasn't quite as ready as I'd hoped to be, but with so many helpers, we managed to get it installed all the same.

When we finished, we toasted ourselves with a little prosecco, and enjoyed a great barbeque.

I decided to use Fast Tracks Bullfrog Manual Turnout Controls for controlling the turnouts on Pembroke. I tested these out at a show a couple of years ago, and liked the positive clunk compared to some other systems. I also liked the price (you're getting to know me by now), and finally I like the fact that they're wood.

Andrew came over for the first time in a while this evening and we made a start on the backdrop.  What a battle!  

I went back and forth for ages on what to do about lights for Pembroke. On the one hand, I'm familiar with fluorescent lights, and I know I can get ~5000K bulbs relatively easily. On the other hand, vertical space is at a premium, and I really wanted to check out the new LEDs.

The track on the North Section is finally complete. The elapsed time was longer than the south section, but that was due to real life getting in the way of the trains. Overall, I think the effort was less for this section than the first. Compared to the south section, I made a couple of minor changes in approach.

Keeping the year-end BHAG in mind, I wanted to complete track-laying on the north section before the end of October. Saturday was October 33rd, and I made a last-ditch effort to get it done. When the dust settled around three in the morning, the clocks had retreated an hour (bonus!), and I had all the stock rails and guard rails in place.

I didn't quite get to the point where the Posse could start laying rail when they (in the form of Andrew, Julian being in transit, Jim being MIA and Chris being a thespian) descended upon my garage last night. Even so, we did have a productive evening of ballasting.

I wrote before about my dislike of just about all the switch rods I've ever seen on model railways (including my own).

The standard PC board has two things wrong with it. First, it usually doesn't look much like the prototype, which is typically made of a flat steel bar a couple of inches wide and about half an inch thick. Now, there have been some very fine PC board switch rods that look great, but they will be even more exposed to the second problem.

Just in case you begin to believe that energy on Pembroke has been diverted to Brio-Pembroke, I did actually finish installing the points on the south section of Proto:87-Pembroke last week. Each of the points needed only a little bit of judicious filing before it would sit perfectly against its stock rail and the test truck ran through the right way repeatedly.

Once I started, it went quite quickly, and I was done all four sets in about 90 minutes.

What, wait did I skip a few posts?

Yesterday, my daughter was sick, and I had to stay home to look after her. She wanted to get out the Brio trains and have a good proper play, which is exactly what we did -- for about four and a half hours! Now, ordinarily, I get bored after about an hour of playing horsie show (the trains were taking horses and their trappings to the show), but this time, I built a Brio track of Pembroke, including staging.