As long as I can recall, I have been fascinated by and interested in trains. An "electric train" was on my list for Santa long before my parents thought I was old enough to take care of the American Flyer set that I showed them in a catalog. Now at age 73, and near 35 years actively involved in model railroading, I realized it was time to develop an inventory of the engines currently on the roster. This sort of project seems to sn*wball and leads to sorting and putting away some of those old steamers that were just "display models."
In 2012, I made the leap forward to DCC; not just conversion to DCC, but rewiring the layout so that I could still run and enjoy the DC locomotives in which I would never have decoders installed. I had already started to label and organize the wiring that distributed power to the turnouts and various sections of the layout; I had numbered turnout wiring and color coded the separate wiring to the two mainlines: green and red. The same color coding starts at the powerpack with a broad green or red strip of electrical tape on the pack and on the plug to the surge strip. Now all the wires to the two mainlines are marked with green or red tape. The main yard has blue as the color code. The Digitrax unit and associated wiring received orange as the code color.
Next spread sheet to tackle is that for the Kato Unitrack. The sheet is started with Kato item number, description and price for each item; now I must count each piece. The goal is to have an estimated replacement cost for the track on the layout and in "inventory."
Now as we consider another move as a second phase of our retirement, it is time to have a thorough inventory of items and to move forward with packing the layout!
Now as we consider another move as a second phase of our retirement, it is time to have a thorough inventory of items and to move forward with packing the layout!
In the meantime, I am running trains!!
