For the past several months I have been deferring working on track as I hit a roadblock with controlling my staging yard turnouts.  I am far from an electrical genius so was flummoxed by trying to figure out a workable solution.  During a discussion a while back with my friend Doug H. (who has forgotten more about electronics and such than I'll ever know), he suggested the end run to my staging yard was using a Digitrax DS64 decoder.  I waffled for a while as my cheap side wanted to control the staging yard as inexpensively as possible, while my practical side told me the only way I'd move forward was to get the decoder.

In the end my practical side won, and I picked up a DS64.  I popped by an electronics store and got some green and red LEDs, resistors and some push button switches to set up the local switch panel.

Last night I finally hooked up the decoder and did some programming through my throttle - not the easiest way to do things.  Amazingly after some trial and error I got everything working including routing for the various staging tracks.  More progress in one evening than I have made in the past 8 months!  Onwards we go.

Marc Simpson