Another day with rain

Although it had rained earlier, it was between showers. Rich, Bob Bump and I arrived about 9AM and opened up. I haven't seen Bob for a while so it was good to get back together again. He lamented that he had a steam engine that he had been working on for about 30 years and the boiler had a serious problem. He had jobbed that part out and it could only be fixed with a new boiler. He currently runs a diesel and has apparently given up on the steamer.

I reversed the lowboy head on the roundhouse lead so it points in the correct directions. I had put it on backwards last time I worked on it so it was showing a red aspect for divergent in the wrong direction. The box was dry so the new rubber seals on the screw heads are working to keep out the rain. It had rained overnight last night and the ground was still damp but we were between rains. Rich was going to substitute the power supply for the turnouts by the roundhouse as he noticed the green had a faint glow when the divergent color was on. Since I had speculated about the power supply voltage exceeding the PIV of the LED was causing a leakage current that created a loop in the LEDs, we wanted to see if lowering the supply voltage to 12V from the 16V that the current supply was delivering would cure the problem. We checked a couple of power supplies that we had at the track but we came up short. The supply Rich wanted to use which had a built-in timer turned out to be 12V AC not DC so it would not just interchange. Jack arrived and we split up the jobs that were possible for us. Jack would install the new semaphore on the 1 inch line and Bob and I would start measuring various distances to deliver a more accurate site map. Rich went off to town to get a new power supply.

We measured starting in the Lawson/Grelson area and wound up measuring track from the 1 1/2 inch track approaching the road crossing and finished up the 1 inch station area. It is amazing what two guys can sketch and measure with a 200 foot tape in an hour or so.

Rich came back and we joined him after he put the new supply in. I had added a steering diode in the switch machine box to the green LED lead and that had fixed the problem. We will try shorting out the new diodes to see if the reduced voltage has, in fact, cured the "bleeding" problem.

Next job was to go up on the 1" line and repair the section of wire that was cooked by the fire. We spliced in a new section about 15 feet long to replace the damaged section. Jack finished working on installing the new semaphore and box. It started raining but I went down and got my drill to punch a few holes in the track on the 1 1/2" line near our power terminal. We have a block that starts about 20 feet from the semaphore with the track in between "dead". I am going to add it to the block by a couple of jumpers and a new run-around wire past the turnout. This should give us a better sensing of the occupancy of he block. We have to move the semaphore a few feet as well but this is  to be expected. After drilling the holes for the run-around the rain started coming down harder so we decided to call it a day.