I am in the planning stages and will basically have an shelf layout around an room with an peninsula island. I am thinking I am going to do doubletrack and have an yard at one end, interchange yard and industry in the middle(peninsula) and an intermodal yard at the other end with maybe some staging. Will probably end up having about 170' or so of mainline, so with doubletrack, 340' . My question is do you run 1 set of bus wires and feed both doubletrack and yard tracks off of this, or do you do two sets of bus wires one for each mainline.
Then with all the yard and industry tracks do I just run feeders off of all them to the main bus wires or are yards and industry trackage wired differently. I understand every 3' I should have feeder wires to the bus, just wasn't sure how it is done with doubletrack and all the yard tracks. Also, with this length of trackage what would you suggest for guage of feeders and bus wire?
Thanks.
Rob
I think you'll get several opinions on this Rob. What I did was separate buses for the two main lines (125ft), another bus for the mountain line (150 ft), and another for the yard. I currently use DC but will eventually convert to DCC. I prefer to keep areas logically separate to aid in troubleshooting and to keep possible failures finite in scope. Of course it also allows better individual control in DC as well, but that would not apply to DCC.
12-14ga for bus, 18-22 ga for feeders. It really depends on the number of simultaneously running locomotives.
Karl
The mind is like a parachute. It works better when it's open. www.stremy.net
rswain I am in the planning stages and will basically have an shelf layout around an room with an peninsula island. I am thinking I am going to do doubletrack and have an yard at one end, interchange yard and industry in the middle(peninsula) and an intermodal yard at the other end with maybe some staging. Will probably end up having about 170' or so of mainline, so with doubletrack, 340' . My question is do you run 1 set of bus wires and feed both doubletrack and yard tracks off of this, or do you do two sets of bus wires one for each mainline. Then with all the yard and industry tracks do I just run feeders off of all them to the main bus wires or are yards and industry trackage wired differently. I understand every 3' I should have feeder wires to the bus, just wasn't sure how it is done with doubletrack and all the yard tracks. Also, with this length of trackage what would you suggest for guage of feeders and bus wire? Thanks. Rob
Rob,
I operate in DCC, and I have a double mainline forming a continuous loop with a large freight yard and several industrial sidings. The layout is essentially L-shaped, and the mainline run is 165 feet, so the double mainline totals 330 feet.
I use a single set of 14 gauge bus wires for the entire layout and 22 gauge feeder wires every six feet. The layout is powered by a 5 amp NCE PH-Pro system. I do not maintain any separate power districts, and there are no additional boosters.
I have absolutely no problems with this arrangement.
Rich
Alton Junction