Rewiring, Whew!

The rewiring project is well under way:

There are several subtasks in this phase. One is to remove one DC cab circuit entirely, and replace the other, which had been 22 AWG color coded green and yellow, with 14 AWG DCC cab bus color coded red and black. This will include removing all block toggles from the control panels.

Another task is adding a USB connection from my computer to the layout via an NCE USB interface for JMRI. Here is the USB cable going through the wall into the layout room:

A third task is to replace the control panel toggles that operated Tortoise switch machines with stationary DCC decoders. This will do two things. The first is to allow switches to be thrown at any point on the layout via a handheld DCC controller, rather than having to go to the particular panel with the proper toggle. Here's the old way of doing things:

Neither the block toggles nor the switch toggles will remain when things are finished, though this will take some time. The second advantage will be to use the USB connection to my computer to be able to control switches via a JMRI dispatcher's panel on the computer. (This will only be really useful if I can ever find other operators for the layout.)

I'm also recycling some surplus components removed during rewiring onto the T-Track module project. In addition, I'm using stationary decoders for switches from the start with T-Track.

You can also see an Atlas snap relay, surplus in the rewiring project, that will be controlled by stationary decoder and control signals on the T-track modules.