Golden Spike

Well, I don’t have any pictures uploaded yet, but I thought I should report that I’ve had the “Golden Spike” and have begin running some trains for the first time in three—almost four, actually—years.

Saturday morning dawned grey and rainy—a perfect day for staying inside and working on projects. I spent part of the morning working on a structure kit. It’s nearly finished now—just needs a roof and some figures and it will be done. After lunch, I ventured outside to go get wire at the local Radio Shack. I picked up some spools of 22 gauge solid, and 18 gauge stranded. I also got a new tip for my soldering iron.

When I got back, I had to figure out exactly how I was going to wire the thing. Right now, I just have one loop of track. Since that was the case, I decided to forego any sort of cab control and just wire it as one block. (I’m also toying with the idea of converting to DCC, in which case everything would be wired as one “block” anyway). When I get some more track, it will be easy to convert to cab control without having to tear everything out.

I decided to attach four sets of feeders to the rails. I dug out holes with a screwdriver (foam is great…no powertools here!) and fed pairs of red/black 22 gauge solid through them. The Solid core copper wire is much easier to solder to the sides of the rail than the stranded stuff. I had my first set of feeders fed through, so I plugged in the soldering iron and POP there was a flash of light. I cursed as I realized I had shorted out the soldering iron. Which meant yet another trip to Radio Shack!

I finally made it back with a new 40 watt iron, and set about the process of soldering the feeders to the rail. Essentially, you coat the rail and the wire with flux paste, then tin them (which means coating with a thin layer of solder), and then attach the wire to the rail without using additional solder. It’s a little more difficult than it sounds, because you have to get the wire positioned correctly whilst holding a 40 watt soldering iron. Have to watch your fingers.

Anyway, the process is fairly straight-forward. My feeders won’t win any awards for neatness but they get the job done, and after ballasting the track they’ll be nearly invisible, anyway.

Once my four sets of feeders were in place, I flipped the layout up and leaned it against the couch, then screwed and glued on three terminal strips to the bottom—one on each end and one in the middle. I used 18 gauge stranded wire to connect everything together, meeting at the terminal strip in the middle, to which I attached a longer cord that has a cinch-jones connector on it (think of a miniature normal wall plug and you’ll get the idea). This makes it easy to hook up the power pack.

Once the wiring was completed, I turned the layout back over, cleaned the rails once with a track-cleaning block, hooked up the ancient MRC Tech-II throttle, and set the Kato Mikado on the rails.

And wouldn’t you know it, it actually worked?

I ran the locomotive back and forth for a few moments, and then I could not help but gleefully tear into my storage box and open up every single piece of rolling stock I have. I’ve got a bunch of stuff that hasn’t been run in years. To my great joy, every locomotive I have actually runs (though some are better than others…the K4 Pacific from the 70s has to go at warp speed to do anything…). Even the Bachmann 4-4-0 does well; I certainly made the right decision about the Electro-frog turnouts, because I haven’t had any stalling on turnouts whatsoever.

I’ve spent the last week simply running trains. There are still some track issues to be addressed, and I need to add some more feeders (which will involve cutting gaps in the rail…more on that another time). But it certainly is a joy to see the Mike pull my set of Pennsy passenger cars, which I haven’t been able to run since at least 2001 (probably before that…)

This blog post wasn’t quite as detailed as I wanted it to be, but I’m exhausted and it’s past my bedtime already. I’ll try to get some pictures put up soon!