Been too long since I had a chance to work on the railroad. But the garden is in and doing reasonably well. And the front and side decks have new deck boards -- why would anyone put decking down with ardox screw nails??? 

Anyhow, such is life. But back to the railroad. When I first designed the BQR it was the intent to use occupancy detection to keep track of things in the (unfortunately) many hidden areas. My power plan was to use a separate BDL168 for each end of the layout as part of power districting and so forth. But I really did not think through all the wiring and rail gapping that this would require. Then I got the urge to restructure some of the track work. There were consequences.

If I had really thought it through I would have used local current transformers like the units from rr-cirkits, but no, having sunk costs in a couple of BDL168s... Anyhow, the wiring is done and debugged -- save for one instance of polarity reversal that was easy to fix. Now the joy of actually running a train around to see if the zones actually trip as expected...

And the Ro-Ro elevator still works, although some of the shelves needed re-alignment.

Have finished testing the electrically operated turnouts -- pretty much everything worked, much to my surprise. So far, one unconnected lead, one displaced actuator wire, one unseated plug, one sticking throwbar and two hand laid turnouts that just dont seem to switch properly (although I swear they worked well when being built and first laid... sigh).

Now to run some trains...

Just one small problem... it has been a long time since I got to run any kind of a train around the layout. The track has not waited.. it is truly depressing how poorly the equipment operates on what appears to be fairly clean track. Did the track cleaning eraser bit -- improves things but no where nearly as quickly as I expected. Wondering if the Dremel with a polishing pad would help?

Anyhow, the goal now is just to get things to the point where I can run a loco around pushing a track cleaning boxcar. And wondering what other sub-par build quality issues I will discover?