Oyama Staging Yard I - Construction and Track Design

The west staging yard, which I'm calling Oyama, since it is in the place where Oyama Yard is on the S-Line, is now finished and installed in the train house. I've got a video on YouTube showing this yard and how it operates.

The video shows Oyama yard in the position where I did the final assembly and testing. Since then, a couple of people that I work with came out and helped me lift it up so that it is now on the shelf brackets you can see at the top of this video, or the my earlier post about trains in the train house.

I had an early post about construction, so I won't go into too much detail about that here, other than including a picture of the bottom of the front half of the staging yard to show you what's going on.

Not shown here are the flanges on the cross braces, which sit on top of the shelf brackets. This is a bit of rework, because I measured the joist locations incorrectly. My building plan has since been corrected.

The next photo shows the top of this section, with the roadbed and track installed.

The roadbed is Homabed, from the California Roadbed Company. This is their 45 degree Mainline roadbed for N-scale. The turnouts are mostly made with Fast Tracks fixtures and assembly jigs. These are number 7 turnouts, and if you look closely, you can spot a couple impostors mixed in there, Atlas number 7 turnouts. My local hobby shop happened to have some when I was in there, so I picked them up.

I also tried a bit of an experiment here, and hand laid some of the tracks. I found that I enjoyed doing this, but also that it took too long. Also, I think that the Micro-Engineering code 55 flex track looks better. You can see my safety gate on the right side, to prevent my trains from flying off of the end of the world while I was testing them. There is similar protection at the other end. You can also see all of the turnouts numbered so that I can keep everything straight.

This compound yard ladder design was created with the help of my friend Fred whom I knew from back when we were both studying engineering at UNC-Charlotte (me in mechanical, Fred in civil engineering). The original idea was a straightforward compound ladder, but it wouldn't fit!, so we laid this out one afternoon in my garage. I'd like to thank him for his assistance.

The switches here are all thrown with Tortoise switch machines form Circuitron. I made a couple of attempts using R/C servos for this, but didn't come up with anything that worked as well and was as easy to install.

Here's a shot of the other side of the finished section, with the Tortoises and all wiring installed.

I slightly modified the Tortoises by drilling some holes in the connector, so that I could solder 8-pin headers to them, then used a matching connector to plug onto the header. The gold-ish strips along the top are LED strips to illuminate the level below this one. The terminal strips on the right are to make connections with the back half of the staging yard.

The details of the wiring and programming of this part of the layout will be in the next posting.