Controlling power to staging yard tracks

Back in September in the post Control center for the staging yard I briefly mentioned  the circuit I built to turn each of the sidings in the staging yard ON and OFF simultaneously with the routing of the turnouts.  In the post I want to give more details on this.  I'm running DCC so why do I need to do this ?  At this point I've not really gotten my head around the JMRI / Panel Pro stuff and I would like to do some automation of some parts of the layout in the future.

This is the pair of circuit boards I made to switch power between each of the tracks of the yard.

The smaller board is a diode matrix and the larger one contains the latching circuits and relays.

This is the schematic drawing for the larger board, the 5 track power routing board  I realize this is 1970's technology but it works.  It's a larger version of one I built for the Peninsula Ntrak staging yard several years ago.  More recently I have written some code and successfully bench tested with LED's the same function with an Arduino Uno micro controller.

To make this work with an Arduino I will need to build a special shield board with the necessary relays, circuits to drive the relays, and terminal strip connections.  When I get a chance to work on that, I'll be sure to share it in a post.

The diode matrix is something that also is worthy of more explanation and that will be another future post.