what information would a technical description need to include to be able to maintain the layout and potentially expand it?
what would be a good way of maintaining the information and making it available to member interested in it?
greg - Philadelphia & Reading / Reading
I would go with MS word documents, because it's still the most common system and is generally backwards compatible. I would use Excel where appropriate, and be sure to take lots of well-lit photos.
It takes an iron man to play with a toy iron horse.
Hi Greg,
Our club wrote up a set of standards before we started construction of the new permanent layout. We have made a few changes to them but pretty much everything has been done according to those guidelines. We set standards for max. grade, minimum radius, turnout sizes, etc. etc. Whether or not those rules are followed down the road will be up to the club members at the time.
One of the interesting things about our standards is that not only do they dictate what will be done, but they also dictate what won't be done. We did that in order to prevent any individuals from 'doing their own thing' and potentially creating problems. We had that happen with our portable layout when we were refurbishing it. A couple of members did some things without consulting anyone which caused huge problems and messed up areas that we thought were finished. For example, one person decided to add white boulders to an area of black ballast that had just been beautifully re-done. I don't ever recall seeing fresh ballast that was covered in football size or larger rocks. This same individual decided to go nuts with static grass. He painted a huge yard area, tracks, turnouts and all, with undiluted white glue and then applied the grass. I've never seen grass growing on the tops of rails! It took hours and hours of work to make the area function properly again and look right. Nobody is allowed to do anything on the new layout without the permission of the layout construction foreman who is following the standards agreed upon by the Layout Committee.
There are also the obvious things like having a chart which shows all the various wire colours and gauges, and having all the turnouts clearly numbered so they get hooked up properly. That includes numbers on the turnouts themselves, on the tortoises, on the control panel wires and on the toggle switches (with switch numbers on both the front of the panel and on the back of the panel).
Dave
I'm just a dude with a bad back having a lot of fun with model trains, and finally building a layout!
by technical, i'm concerned with the electronic boards and connections of the layout.
being able to locate and identify a turnout or block and the circuits controlling the turnout and powering/detecting a block. And relating it back to CTC control software
A document of what each connection is used for would be the most useful. Something such as Board 4, Termianl 2 goes to the red LED of signal 321.
But to maintain the boards themselves - you need in addition, a schematic, or at least a block diagram, and a list of gozintas and gozoutas. If the board contains logic - a truth table should be included. Armed with that information, especially the truth table, years from now someone familiar with electronics could create a replacement board that performs the same function even if it is not electrically identical.
--Randy
Modeling the Reading Railroad in the 1950's
Visit my web site at www.readingeastpenn.com for construction updates, DCC Info, and more.
layout has 111 Blocks, 132 Turnouts, 214 Signals and 45 I/O Nodes. many capacitive discharge and signal driver cards.
assumed being able locate the node, capacitive discharge/signal driver board and turnout/signal would be enough. thinking maps
many boards are custom: so schematic, board layout and firmware. Hadn't thought about a logic description nor ability to design a replacement.
Gonna need one of those REALLY thick binder...
do you think paper is the best media for documenting this?
Given there are still large numbers of people who prefer paper - I'd say it ought to be in both electronic and paper formats. A paper copy of everything, especially if the sheets are put in those plastic protectors, will last a long time in a readable format. Storing it electronically - there's always the danger down the road that nothing will be able to read the format. Even "safe" ones like PDF, there's no real guarantee. But it's your best chance. But in addition to format, there's storage media. My last two computers don;t even have a CD/DVD drive of any sort. USB sticks - what's the storage lifetime? These are all issues facing even small museums as well - how to store the information indefinitely. It may be that the best solution to long term storage is to install procedures that periodically copy the data from the current storage to new storage, either a new one of the same, or whatever the newest best option is at the time, and make it policy that this is done every few years.
Even decent paper (unless you use really expensive acid-free archival paper) will degrade over time, but even then, it shoud last years. I can't imagine this documentation would need to be used that frequently. I'm thinking this is more for the future when some component fails and there's no one left who was involved in the original construction to know how to fix it.
what about web based?
easily updated and shared, backed-up, standard format (html)
nothing on anything physical media that can get lost or becomes out of date.
gregcwhat about web based? easily updated and shared, backed-up, standard format (html) nothing on anything physical media that can get lost or becomes out of date.
Storage is not an either/or, it can be several different media.
To make a paper copy, you will first want a electronic copy.
Then electronic copies to the cloud, wide but limited access, but few allowed to write to it.
Also a thumb stick copy for the club board members and maintence team members.
No risk of an unfortunate accident destroying the only copy.
Update whenever anything is changed.
Storing that all on a web site puts you at the mercy of the ISP. I think it would be a great idea to make that information available to those who are interested. I look at lots of electronic projects on web sites, I don't just stare at my own. BUT there needs to be an additional copy or copies. All the stuff on my web page (by now the one-offs, like pictures I've posted here, probably exceeds the actual content on construction of my layout) also exist in other places for backup. There's a whole image of my web site on my desktop which is where I code it all, which is also backed up to my server, which is backed up to a cloud backup service. Some of that redundancy is just what happens to come with some of the system I use and really involved no additional setup work, and in some cases may be overkill but the stuff I can;t repalce, like the digital photos, are redundant across multiple physical hard drives AND a cloud backup.
Greg,
Have you ever looked at the wiring diagram for a car? The good ones identify every wire and component touched by wire. They even give indicators for where the component is located. They are not easy to read because they contain a ton of information. Not my area but I am sure there are CAD programs for building a wiring diagram like that. Would not be a trivial task and it would be tough to maintain because many people will make "just this one little change" and never document it.
Paul D
N scale Washita and Santa Fe RailroadSouthern Oklahoma circa late 70's
how about these hypotheticals. What would you need to know? what questions would you have?
- a turnout stops functioning from either a tower panel or CTC software. what would you want to know?
- a turnout can no-longer be operated from a tower panel, but can from CTC software?
- an occupancy detector either doesn't indicate or constantly indicates?
- a signal is dead?
- a section of the layout involving many blocks is dead?