Rebuilding Peco PL13 switch contacts

I have been working on a major side project.  I am doing an overhaul of the Ntrak club's 20 ft long staging yard.  Specifically, trying to correct the problem we have been having with getting the voltages to switch between tracks on the yellow and blue Ntrak lines.

This yard uses Peco solenoids to move the turnout points and separate solenoids with the PL13 switch contacts to route the power to each of the yard tracks.  Checking with an ohm meter these contacts were only intermittently making contact, making high resistance contact, and sometimes no contact at all.  No wonder we were having problems.

As these devices are widely used and rather expensive to replace, I thought it would be a good topic to present here what I have done to rebuild some of these that were not working correctly.

The PC board can be separated from the black plastic housing by pushing with a small flat blade screwdriver through one of the openings on either end of the housing.

Once the board was removed from the housing it could be seen that the contact areas of the board had become oxidized and worn.  Also, the two wiper parts bent at different angles, so it is likely one of them was not making good contact with the board.

I bent both contacts up at a sharper angle and tried to make that angle equal.  I also made more rounded bends at the contact areas to get smoother movement and to make more contact with the PC board.

On some of these the wire lugs that are riveted onto the board broke off with handling and others were about to so I cut them all off and soldered the wires directly onto the bord from the top side.  Any solder that came through to the bottom side needed to be filed smooth for the the board to fit correctly into the black plastic housing.  The contact pads on the board were polished with a fine steel wool.

A small amount of NO-OX is applied with a tooth pick to the contact areas of the PC board.

With the contacts and the black plastic piece in place, the PC board can be snapped into place by pressing it straight down into the housing.  Make sure the switch slides easily back and forth without catching and of course, re-test with an ohm meter.  

Fall 2023 layout update

I was late with a summer update and here we are just over two months later with the fall layout update.  On the layout itself there has not been that much progress as I have been working on several other hobby related projects that have taken up much of my hobby time.

Here are a couple of things that have gotten done on the layout recently.  Fascia was added to the top of the upper helix.  This completes all of the fascia on the layout.

The tunnel portals for the Carlin tunnels have been completed.  The actual ones don't look just like this. I had to make some compromises in the space I have available.  With these two things finished the hillside can be started.  This hillside is where the scenery will end on the east end of the layout.

Last June I brought the Ntrak club's 20 ft staging yard home with me from the N Scale convention in Reno.  This set of modules is over 30 years old and the last time it received an overhaul was in 2009. Some of the issues I have been working on are a couple of broken turnouts, poor elecrical contacts, and missing track feeders.   Each of the four modules is 5 ft long.  Most of the work is being done on the two end modules and those are shown here set up in my train room.

Here is a close up of one of the ends.  Several of the rails were broken from the ties where this yard interfaces with other Ntrak modules and were being held in place with track nails and super glue.  I made up the same type of PC board ties that I have used in several places on the home layout to better secure them.

The goal is to have this staging yard ready for our next layout setup in early December.  

What to do with all those pizza cutter wheels

Having a layout with code 55 track, I have been replacing the deeper flange wheels on freight cars with low profile ones with priority being given to cars that have car cards and are used in layout operations.  So it's no surprise that I have a pile of the "Pizza Cutter" type wheels in my parts box.  Recently I had been making up removable loads for some of my gondolas and thought that old railroad wheels could make a nice load.

I started by cutting wheels off their axles with my spue cutter.

For a base I used a scrap of thin sheet metal cut to fit inside a Micro-Trains 50 ft gondola.

Next I began gluing the cut off wheels with liquid plastic cement.  First layer was laid out flat then additional wheels were added to the first layer.  They were all placed with the outside part of the wheel pointed up.

Similar to how I did with the scrap loads and covered the load with acrylic oxide red paint being careful get it into all the cervices. 

This is the almost finished load in a gondola.  I say almost because I still want to dry brush and weather this old to make it more realistic.  

On the road again - Lake Cascade, ID

During our August RV trip we spent several days in the area of Lake Cascade, Idaho.  We had not originally intended to spend time in this area but changed our plans because of the smoke from several wildfires further north.   This ended up being a great area and an unexpected high point of our trip.  Right next to our camp site was the beginning of a paved trail along the Payette River. 

I knew that at one time there had been a Boise-Cascade lumber mill in this area which had closed in 2001.  This trail was not on the railroad right of way but this sign along the trail indicated some railroad tracks nearby so of course I had to explore.

I did eventually find the railroad tracks.  They appeared to not have been used in quite some time.  What I have read is that this section of track had originally been laid around 1914 by the Pacific and Idaho Northern Railroad then taken over by the Union Pacific in 1936.  UP had abandoned the section north of Lake Cascade in 1980 and sold off the southern section to a new Idaho Northern Railroad in 1993.

There did not appear to be anything left of the lumber mill but there were a couple of siding tracks and a wye.  I did notice that all of the turnouts appeared to be maintained and were locked, and that all of the grade crossing signs were still intact.

There was this one RR maintenance shed within the wye.  Inside were boxes and buckets of spikes, tie plates, etc.  The building itself looked as if could fall down at any time.  That is one leg of the wye behind the shed.

Near where the tracks ended I found this elevated passenger platform which made me think that there had been a tourist railroad here at one time.   I later found out there was a tourist railroad here between 1998 and 2016 called the Thunder Mountain Line Railroad.  It ran for 40 miles along the Payette River between Horseshoe Bend and Lake Cascade.  The main page of their website is still operating at thundermountainline.com.

I was able to walk up the ramp and inspect the interior of the station platform.  Still seemed in good shape.  Maybe there is hope that this tourist railroad might reopen some day.

On the road again - Cashmere, WA

During our August RV trip we spent some time in central Washington state.  We decided to visit a place called the Cashmere Museum and Pioneer Village.  The interior of the building was full exhibits about the history of the area of the native people that had lived there.

The outdoor area had a collection of original pioneer buildings that had been relocated from various locations around the area to create something of a village. 

A part of the outdoor portion of the museum was a nicely done exhibit dedicated to Great Northern Railroad artifacts.  Like the Pioneer Village, all of these artifacts had been relocated here from various locations.   The Great Northern line, now operated by BNSF is only a few hundred feet from the museum site across the Wenatchee River.  A short section of track had been laid along one side of the museum stie.  The center piece of this exhibit was Great Northern caboose X494.

Visitors could enter the interior of the caboose.  As seen in this photo, it was bare bones but well preserved.

Next to the track near the caboose is the original 1900 flag stop station for Mission, which was the town's name until 1940.

At one end of the track was this Great Northern section house.  This section house was relocated to the museum site from the town of Leavenworth, which is about 10 miles to the west and is where our camp site was.

This was another one of those pleasant surprises that we found in our travels. 

Scrap yard fencing

I have been continuing work on the scarp yard in Carlin and wanted to create some fencing similar to what I had seen around such places. I started with some corrugated foil material that I have used to make roofs on some structures.  A little package of this material was my first ebay purchase back in 2001 and has been used on several projects over the years.  This material was cut into 10 scale feet high strips.  The one shown in the upper right of this photo is how shiny it is so I painted them a duller aluminum color and dry brushed some weathering on them.

Coiled razor wire at the top of the fence was made by winding 30 gauge magnet wire around a bamboo skewer.  This was then painted a silver color before being attached to the top cross frame of the fence with Super glue.

I built frames for the fence from .030 x .030 styrene strip painted roof brown before attaching the simulated metal sheeting.  This photo shows this in the section that has the gate for the track.

The foil material was then attached to the frame with tiny dots of E6000 adhesive using a bamboo skewer.  The foil material is nonconductive and since the frame is made from styrene, there is no chance of shorting the rails.

The gate is supported by a single pin at one end that is not glued into the base so the gate can swing open.  The spacing was set so that freight cars and locomotives can pass through without hitting the fence.

Still plenty more to do to finish this scrap yard.  More in future posts.

On the road again - near Terrebonne, OR

 In August my wife and I did a 2 week long trip with our travel trailer to the Pacific Northwest.  On the second day of the trip we were north bound on US 97 north of Bend, Oregon when we decided to pull into a highway rest stop.  We soon discovered that we had entered a historically important site.  

We discovered that US 97 and the parallel railroad track were about to cross a rather deep gorge and the Crooked River.  This large rest stop is known as the Peter Skene Odgen State Scenic Viewpoint.  I was not familiar with this river so had to stroll around the site and check things out.  

The arched rail bridge was originally built for the Oregon Trunk Railroad around 1911 and apparently still in use today by the BNSF although we did not see a train pass while we were there.

The site also includes the old 2 lane US 97 bridge which was built in 1926.  It is in the foreground in this photo and it's wider replacement built in the 1990's is in the background. 

While the old highway bridge is not open to vehicle traffic, it is open to pedestrians and connected to the park. Visitors can walk out to get a different view of the gorge.

Summer 2023 layout update

Summers always go by so quickly and summer 2023 especially so.  

With the pandemic now seemingly behind us, my wife and I have been trying to make up for lost time in regards to travel.  Earlier this year we spent a month Japan, then in April spent a few days in Santa Rosa, CA, and then in June attended the N Scale convention in Reno, NV.  We still plan to get in a longer RV trip before the summer is over and then a trip to the eastern US in the fall.

Not so much has been happening as far as construction progress on the layout.  I have been enjoying operating the layout regularly by myself and have been continuing to develop the operations.   I've also been doing some small projects which have been presented here.

I have also taken on a couple of hobby related projects outside of this layout.  First is the design and building of a control system for a pair of 5 track staging yards that are part of a friend's large N Scale, DC controlled double track layout.  These are the control panels that I have built for this project.  They are built using the same methods as I have used for the control panels on my layout.   The painter's tape around the edges is to keep any debris from getting in between the layers and will be removed just before installation.

The track power control circuits that were removed from my layout have been modified to control the turnouts on this project.  I have also built a pair of new diode matrix boards to match this yard's track plan.  

I came home from the N Scale convention with the Ntrak club's 30-year-old, 20 ft staging yard which is in need of an overhaul.  The main part of the project will be to change the electrical track selection from using the Peco contacts to some sealed relays.  This was done on the red line during the last overhaul in 2011 and eliminated any voltage drops on that line. So this time this will be done on the yellow and blue lines.  Then there are a few other minor repairs to make and my deadline for this is early December when we have our next setup.  This is that yard in it's storage configuration along with it's legs sitting under part of the layout.  It's 20 ft long overall in four 5 foot sections.  All of the work to be done is on the 2 end sections and those can be set up in the middle of my train room.

So through the rest of this year, most of the time spent in the train room will be spent on electronics work but I can still do plenty of running on the layout and may even sneak in a few more small layout projects too.

Patching a patch job

During the N Scale convention held in Reno in June, Scaletrains sent out their PS-2 4785 3 bay covered hopper painted for Golden West Service and patched for Cotton Belt (SSW) to everyone who attended the manufacturers breakfast on Sunday morning.  What a nice surprise that was.  Because my wife also attended, we received two of these models with the same number so I wanted to re-number one of them.

I always like to start with a prototype photo and so looked through a bunch online.  The patches on these cars were done in several different ways.  I settled on this one although it is less weathered than the model.  While the stock Scaletrains model has a dark blue background with yellow characters, this one appears to have a black background with white characters.

.

First thing to do was to remove the original patch.  I found that with a soaking of Microscale Micro Sol and gentle scraping with an Xacto blade, the original patch comes off fairly easily.

For the black background I used some of the wider stripes from a black stripe set I had.  None of the stripes were wide enough so I doubled the rows to get the width I needed.

This is the area with the black stripes applied.  The black stripe decals were applied in between bunt not over the panel seam to match the prototype photo.  These were then given an application of Micro Sol before the characters were started. 

This is how the model looked after the characters were applied.  As the weathering on these cars was identical, I added just a bit more to this one to make them seem different.  This was a fun project.  Most prototype patch jobs tend to be held to lower standards then original paint jobs so a few crooked decals or mismatched character fonts can be forgiven.  These are great models and I'm really happy to have them on my layout.