The weekend is over.

When we arrived on Saturday Rich had a job he wanted to get busy on - cleaning out the shop building. He marshalled several folks and they removed everything from the middle of the building and cleaned up the floor. Then they brought back the necessary stuff - tools and equipment and got rid of the junk that had accumulated. Using the pallet jack they moved everything including the safe! The new arrangement makes the room seem almost spacious.

I started to replace the lights in the crossing signals with the new Lambertian LEDs that I had made into assemblies this last week at home. They mount to the back of the light boxes and have not only a brilliant white light but they have about 170 degrees of dispersion. The only problem is getting them to stay in position until the glue sets. I found that the light boxes rotated so I could place the assemblies on the back of the light boxes and gravity would keep the part in position. The drying time is about three or so hours so it took a long time to get the pieces bonded. Then the question was are they bright enough and I asked several members to give me their opinion. I believe the brightness value where they are set is slightly on the dim side but they are useable the way that they are. Rich later told me he would like to see them brighter so I will have to alter their dropping resistors but this is not too difficult. As the LEDs are made into an assembly with the dropping resistor they become more like a 12V polarized lamp than an LED so I have to modify the driving circuit board as it is set up for the old LEDs. I did not have time today to finish the changes, I set the LEDs to simply come on if a train is coming and the flashing will have to wait for another week. One LEDs glue had not set so I could not connect it or rotate the housing back to vertical as the assembly would move out of place by gravity so I had to leave it open and horizontal.

I am working on a bell circuit for the crossing as well. I have a bell circuit that I got from a railroad club in England that uses a doorbell and uses a flip flop to ring it at about a ding every half-second or so. I started working on another interface board to use the existing flip-flop board as a source and trigger a couple of relays to flash the LEDs and an interface circuit to ring the bell on a small perfboard. I am using a new type of relay that is polarized as it has a diode built-in so it directly interfaces with solid state devices and, of course, I got the polarity of the circuit backwards so I had to troubleshoot the new interface board all Sunday afternoon.

Rich stopped by to say that he was out for a drive with Cathy and they came over to the track. While they were there they whitnessed an accident that took out the power to the 1" carbarn so next Saturday we have an AC repair instore first thing.