It was a busy weekend in our house between kids activities and sleepovers, regular household duties and having some visitors over.  Between all of that activity I managed to get the DCC booster and transformer moved to their permanent home on a shelf under the layout.  I found an old shelf from a home entertainment center that was not being used for anything to house the electronic gizmos. 

Not as pretty as some people's wiring but it will do...

I also wired in the Digitrax PM42 circuit breaker for the four power districts on the lower level of the layout – lower staging, Cranberry Portage/South Main, Channing/Peninsula and Flin Flon Smelter.  I tagged all the lines at the PM42, with the intention to also tag the various bus lines at various locations to make troubleshooting (hopefully) easier.

I also hooked up another throttle plug in at the South Main headframe.  This should be the last plug required on the lower level, but this will be confirmed once operations commence. 

I got another GP38-2W up and running and started with the renumbering process to change its number from 4769 (I have 3 of this number) to 4760.  I have photos of 4760 at the smelter in 1996 so will have a good guide to get it weathered as per the prototype.  I had it running around the layout in both directions to break it in, did so without issue.  Another unit to add to the fleet.   

I also did some repairs on my HBR SD50 5005, but it still seems to have issues.  It ran well when I started it up, but after a bit of run time started to surge and jerk with the headlight flickering in time with the surging.  I suspect a wiring issue so will have to open it up again to check things out. 

The 3 Athearn SD50 I have in Hudson Bay Railway paint all have radically different running characteristics; 5005 runs like a jack rabbit when it does run, 5002 is very slow to ramp up speed and 5010 runs quite well.  I think this is one for JMRI to level the speed curves.  If that doesn’t work I’ll have to re-motor at least one of them.

And finally this morning before heading to work I started drilling holes for wiring the frogs and locating the Bluepoint switch machines.  A busy but productive weekend overall.