- May 6
The open house was held, and things went pretty well, with just a couple of exceptions. A circuit breaker tripped twice causing a loss of 12 V power to staging and Bermanville. Without 12 V power, reversing relays on block cards don't work, and switches can't be thrown, causing some amount of mayhem. As always, the afternoon session was full of kids, and these seemed to be grabbier than usual, leading to some derailments. Five trains were running on the mainline during the afternoon. In the evening, Alvar decided to see how many he keep running smoothly. The answer was eight. Unfortunately he tried to run ten trains, and got confused. leading to some incidents. The new blocks added last week helped things run more smoothly.
- May 10
This progress report is full of gratuitous pictures, since we've fallen behind recently...
Tomasz worked on wireless cabs. While he has figured out the basics of how to get the wireless modules to talk to the microcontrollers and each other, he hasn't figured out why they don't seem to transmit farther than about a foot.
John McNamara worked on the viaduct area, specifically working out how to build scenery under the bridge and connect scenery in front of the bridge to the hillside already constructed behind the bridge.
John Shriver continued the tedious and exacting job of hanging trolley wire. He is now down to the Bassex House hotel on the east bound track. Soon he will be making the turn back toward the trolley barn.
- May 20
Tomasz worked to install a switch machine in the area where a chemical plant is planned. This switch was built at least two years ago, but the switch motors were never installed.
John Purbrick worked on the fueling tracks in the engine yard, laying more plaster between the rails. The picture shows him shaping the surface of the plaster between the rails to slope down to a drainage channel in the middle.. Real fueling tracks are built with concrete like this to catch any spilled fuel.
Tom fixed a minor bug in the SCab program that prevented yard display panels from automatically reconnecting to the server if communications are lost (as happens when the server is restarted). A second bug that caused problems with the automatic stop-on-red function was also fixed.
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