the last few days i had plenty of time to continue work on the north end of the main yard. so all except two turnouts are in place. then i prepared a board with all dcc components. 5 tam valley quad decoders with one relay board each are mounted. relay boards will control polarity of the frogs. installation of the servos took a while. mainly because some of the servos were doa. so i had to replace them immediately after installation. kind of a bummer. i should have tested them before. oh well.... while installing the servose i also noticed that some of the old turnouts need to be replaced. fortunately i had a few new ones available. you might wonder why turnout fail. well, some of them are from my former layout. that means, they had been installed, used and removed again. especially removing usually isn't easy for these fragile pieces. after all servos were hooked up i found out they draw more than the 8 amps the dedicated digitrax booster is able to deliver. so i grabed a tam valley 5 amp decoder and hooked up two quad decoders to this booster. works like a charm now. i didn't expect the "few" servos to max out an 8 amps booster. but obviously they draw quite a bit of power. on the other hand i don't exaclty know how many servos are actually hooked up to that booster. might be 40 or more.
here's the board with the tam valley stuff.
the two missing turnouts will be installed further to the left of the picture. the numbers are actually the dcc address of the turnout. once everything is running the last address will be 92. but some of them power more than one turnout. i think all in all there are 106 digitally controlled turnouts on my layout.
weekly work report..........02/13/2026
Posted - 02/15/2026 : 17:45:46
