Some additional progress on Fuhgeddaboudit Yard.  Finished laying tracks in the locomotive servicing area along with weathering and installing the bases of three of the yard's servicing areas - ash pit, coal tipple and diesel servicing.

In a major brain dead senior moment I misplaced and cannot find the base for the two bay car shop.  Sheet styrene will be used to replace it.

Built an ascending / descending ramp for the coal delivery to the tipple using Woodland Scenics preformed 2% incline / decline set and 1/2" riser set along with plaster cloth.  Using the Woodland Scenics products was a lot easier than scratch building plus I have enough left over for two additional incline / decline areas.

Next is the power distribution for the four locomotive servicing tracks.  I will be using the switches in the turnout motors to turn power on only to the track designated by the yard master.

A few snapshots below of the locomotive servicing area.  Any structures you see are from Dick Wegner's finely detailed layout.

Overall view of the yard.  Loco servicing on left and classification yard on right.

Locomotive servicing area

Yup, lousy job in Photoshop covering up the junk behind the layout in the photo above.

Since turnout motors are back ordered I plan to start work adding two 8 feet long x 2 feet wide sections to lengthen the mainline, add sidings for the coal mine and a bridge over what will be a canal.

Reverse loop through Fuhgeddaboudit Yard is in, powered and tested using a PSX-AR autoreverser.  Most likely I will change the two PSX-AR autoreversers for the yard and mainline loops to a two port Frog-AR which cuts the cost per autoreverse loop about in half.

The mainline loop will not have a high current load since the maximum number of locos on the loop at any one time may be three.  The yard loop will have a higher power requirement with up to five or six locos.  Assuming two yard switchers sorting cars plus three or four road engines moving in and out of the servicing area.

I plan to use the switches in the turnout motors to turn power off and on to individual tracks in the loco servicing area.  The two switches in the Circuitron Tortoises have a maximum current rating of one amp and I will use one for powering the turnout frog so I cannot run a parallel electrical path through both switches.  The DCC Concepts Cobalts have two switches and each switch is rated at five amps so I will be able to use one of the switches to turn power on and off to individual tracks and the other switch for the frog.  Problem is that the Cobalts are out of stock due to some parts coming from China.  I will be calling DCC Concepts (UK company) tomorrow to get and update.

DCC Concepts also has some interesting control systems for turnouts that I am looking into.

Well, so much for the boring stuff.  I did get a Big Boy and DD-40 consist going.  Just took a while to speed match them.  Low quality iPhone video below.