Simple Wiring

The last time I built a layout with power routing turnouts I made a big mistake.  In short, I relied on the contact between the point and stock rails to conduct current (OK if the track is really clean!).  Another bungle was not running power feeds to tangent track between opposing turnouts.  Power routing does funny things in this situation and trains come to a disappointing halt.  Long story short, it ended up taking me forever to run all those feeds and rout the wires accordingly.  Definitely not the way to go.  So--this time I'm running feeds everywhere.  I did leave several single spurs alone so I could park engines.  This is the nice thing about power routing.  It simplifies wiring.  Or does it? 

Another little trick I'm trying out is not new, but really practical in my opinion.  Soldering leads to rail joiners rather than the rail itself.  Like so:

One thing I never liked is the look of a wire soldered to the side of the rail.  Granted, there are other methods, such as soldering to the bottom of the rail.  But, I'm going with this.  Here's another view of some of them installed:

The plan is to rout the wires to the middle of the layout and then connect them to a common bus wire.  I'll then run these out to a jack located at the layout's edge.  This will make for pretty simple wiring.  Good for a small layout like this.  But how to rout the wires cleanly.  With conventional benchwork, one can simply put the wires under the subroadbed and rout them accordingly.  Can't do that here as we're building on a flat sheet of foam.  Cutting troughs in the foam crossed my mind, but then I had another idea.  Its such small gauge wire that I could run it at grade level and it would cover up just fine with scenery.  That said, I simply twisted the wire up and used tape to secure it.  When I had to cross the right of way, I simply cut a slit perpendicular to the track center line in the foam roadbed and tucked the wires into the slit.  Like so:



I don't think there are many model railroaders out there who enjoy wiring.  At least, I've never met one.  I'm surely not one of them.  I'm glad the wiring is minimal.  Definitely another advantage to building a small layout.  Next time, we should see some track laid and maybe a some trains running.  Till then...