Moving Forward...

First off, I want to thank everyone who has sent their condolences and well wishes, either through this blog, or by private message.  It's been hard, very hard, dealing with the loss of both my parents in such a short period of time, but all the love and support that I've received from my friends and family have meant so much to me.  Thank you. :)

Keeping busy is one of the best ways to help cope, and I have been moving along with some pressing projects that needed to get done on the layout.  The most urgent thing turns out to be a problem that popped up recently.  Two of the three power districts dropped dead, and would not power up at all.  At first talking with some friends we thought maybe we had a Frog Juicer go down and take out the section it controlled.  After testing each Juicer in the districts affected, I determined it was not them.  I then turned my attention to the power control board where the circuit breakers, and power supply was.  If you remember a while back I had two of the four DCC Specialties (Tonys Train Exchange was actually the manufacturer at the time) circuit breaker boards crap out, and I had to do a quick fix by combining two of the 4 districts into one, making the railroad a three district railroad.  Money was tight so I bought a NOS older single Powershield and reused the remaining TTX 2 circuit breaker board.  This worked for a time but when the current problem popped up, I checked voltage going into the board, which was the full 14v and then checked the outputs which were showing 2-4v fluctuation on both breakers.  Basically, they were toast.  The boards were old, from my original L&HR layout, but I felt that layout, along with the current one, was never run that much so the boards shouldn't have crapped out.  Last week I had to bite the bullet and order new DCC Specialties PSX4 (4 circuit breaker board)  from Yankee Dabbler (who had the best price including shipping) and install it.  Now everything is back to normal.  I probably should have done that to begin with, instead of trying to salvage the older breakers.

The old power board with the older TTX circuit breakers.

I had to remove the power board to work on it at the workbench.

Panel at the workbench ready for the transplant.

DCC Specialties PSX4 circuit breaker panels.

The new PSX4 installed on the power board.  It actually looks neater since I did not need the terminal strips anymore.

It lives again! :)

So far, the layout is running like a champ again, so I'm happy about that. 

I have more progress to share, but I will leave that for the next post.