Wiring - part 14

 

The two external tracks are finally fully functional; it includes:

• Block detection for both RC and non-RC sections
• Control of all switches

The tracks in the middle are temporary as I was expected sections C4 and C5 to be connected to ECoS_Detector_1 port 2 and 3, but the segment would not turn red when occupied. I added 16 sections in the middle as a way to debug the wiring. As it turns out, C4 and C5 were linked to port 10 and 11. I still need to find out what went wrong.

Track cleaning - part 3

 

Following the previous post on cleaning tracks, I tried today to run the Mabar cleaning wagon with the "sanding" disk and it seems that it might be just too rough. 

See below for those striations:

TER Nord-Pas-de-Calais

 

I found a long time ago a YouTube video of an AGC X 76500 going from Ascq to Orchies; this is here. I'm happy that I can now simulate the same maneuver on my layout:

And some pictures of the two trains:

Switch control

 

So now that trains are running on clean tracks, let's control the switches and move the trains across the various routes! Except ...

Controlling double slip switches with the ESU ECoS

The ECoS has a 4-way double slip switch in its library. 

It is controlled by two switch motors. The ECoS automatically assigns the next digital address to the second switch motor. I knew that and covered this in this post here.

Unfortunately it didn't work as expected. I could not figure out what was wrong and how to correctly configure and control them. I didn't find anything really helpful online, but with some information gathered online (here and here) and a lot of trial and errors, I got them to work correctly.

Here are the things to pay attention to:

• Two switch motors with consecutive digital addresses (see above)
• The motor with the lower/first digital address has to be on the left side
• Swap the power wires on one switch engine; this is the trial-and-error part, and it works eventually!

Success!

Two videos of trains crossing the double slip switches: