A few months ago I bought a used Bachman H16-44 with DCC installed. It worked but I wanted to play with the CVs. I got curious about what decoder was in it so I took it apart. The entire decoder and wiring were taped up like a cocoon with black electrical tape. What a gooey gloppy mess to take apart. Some mineral spirits and Q-Tips and about a half hour of scrubbing removed most of it. I re-taped with Kapton and the install looks much neater and I know will stay put without the gooey mess. The decoder can breathe too.

The staging level had been completed and running for several months and I had been inching along on the main level due to a lot of diversions to my time in the layout building. But now, I have finally been making some progress on getting a major portion of the visible part of the layout in working condition. 

Those of you doing Operations, how do you switch your yards? I was playing today at the club because after 6 hours of making sure the Ops session was ready the turnout was a SPECTACULAR failure. With my switchlists already done though, I lashed an engine to the first two tracks of cars and began shuffling cars into four trains. It's the prototype way, and honestly makes more sense than doing it one train at a time, but the little voice in my head was saying "Gee, Dispatcher needs a train ready to get a crew busy, and you have all of yours...