Controls for Carlin - Part 2

The turnout controls for the 13 turnouts within the Carlin section and a display panel showing the position of all 15 turnouts in this part of the layout are done.  The idea is to have the knobs along the front edge for each turnout and with LED's on the panel showing the route alignment.

Here is a close up of the panel itself.  The turnouts that can create a route through the yard are labeled E1 to E5 (east end) and W1 to W5 (west end).  Those use a pair of 2mm green LED's to show the point position.  The spur tracks are labeled S1 to S5 and use a bi-color LED with green indicating aligned and red indicating diverging.  Notice in the photo below that W4 and W5 are dark.  That is because these are going to be on an adjoining section and are not yet fully connected.  W5 on the panel has a toggle switch as it is the only one that is using a motor because of it's location.

The connections for the W4 and W5 turnouts have been wired to some plugs that will make it easier to connect things after both sections are installed in the layout.

 

Controls for Carlin - part 1

The track work and mechanical controls for the 13 turnouts that are on the 8 foot Carlin section have now been completed and it's time to get serious about the control / display.  This panel will show point position for all 15 turnouts on both sections and have 1 toggle switch to move the points at W5 on the small section.

As I mentioned in a previous post, All of the turnouts in Carlin are going to be manually controlled.  My usual rule regarding the use of manual or electric control are whenever 2 or more turnouts are to be controlled together then go electric.  In the case of Carlin I went through all the scenarios of operation and could not find any situation where I did not want to have individual control of each turnout.  There will be one turnout on the far side of the river that will be electric because of difficulty of getting a manual control to work properly.

The panel drawing shown in a previous post has been modified just a bit, the new version shown below.  The spur track for the chemical transfer got turned around to allow for enough open space along the front edge to mount the panel as the edge of the 8ft section is going to have 13 push-pull control knobs.  Also the numbering has been rearranged so that the knobs will be in sequence from left to right.  A copy of this graphic will be used as a pattern to drill all of the holes in the panel then another copy will be used for the actual display.

The turnouts for the 5 spur tracks (S1-S5) will use bi-color LED's with green indicating aligned and red indicating diverging.  For all of the other turnouts that are part of a route, a pair of green LED's will be used to show point position.  The negative side of the regulated 12 volt DC bus will be the common for all of the LED's.  The positive of the 12 volt supply is run to the center position on all of the turnout control switches.  Then wires from each side of each switch are run to an LED on the panel.  Each of these LED's gets a resistor so I made the tempoary setup shown below to test which values would be needed to get the best balance of brightness and have ordered what is needed.

Right now I am running all the wires from the turnout contacts to a terminal strip near where the panel will be.  The panel will be built on the bench with wires coming out the back that will connect to the corresponding wire on this terminal strip.  To be continued...