Well, its been a few weeks now since the last update and the May Ops Session. Due to going on Holidays for a week, the amount of tasks I set myself and the readiness of the AT&SF Boise City Sub layout, I decided to push back my next Ops Session until mid August.

I had set myself a few objectives to be done before the next Ops Session.

The first of these was to have working signals between Oak Ridge and La Follette. These are a pair of intermediate signals to protect against head on accidents as trains round the end of the peninsula through the tunnel. Happily this task is done and the first 2 of my Signals have been built and installed.

Also built and installed are all the remaining track detection ccts. The Main Line and passing tracks are all detected, The main line is detected all the way down to the Staging yards. I have used 2 variations of the Coil detectors in that I have some using Remote Coils and others with distributed track feeds from a group of detectors.

Since I have Detection working it was time to start making freight cars detectable. With 300 Fox Valley wheel sets, a pack 10K surface mount resistors, Super Glue Gel and some wire glue on the work bench, it was time to start production.

Once you get started you can knock out 15 axle lots in under an hour. But it is still going to take a while to get them made up and fitted to over 300 freight cars. FVM wheels are really nice, but need the black finish removed for the wire glue to work. Also the treads need to have the black taken off to help them work.

There are still plenty of tasks still to be done but these will be placed on hold for now.

Over the next few weeks I will be working on preparation for the next Ops Session. Sorting out the freight cars, waybills, repositioning trains and sorting through a few things that came out of the first session.