ok, I finally decided to work on my layout wiring to get things back in shape. I had made changes to accommodate the NCE system I use to have and figured getting it back to normal was a good place to start. Besides my issues with my knees getting down to get at the wiring, the fun is all those wire just staple tacked in place of all description I've see lots of photos of other people's layout that are super orderly wiring that you'd think NASA had done it... You know, terminal strips, all crimped perfectly connections and zip tied and so on. Mine looks nothing like that under my layout... and probably never will.. So am I alone in the point to point wire it up and electric tape stuff etc mess?
OHHHhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh...you are not alone ! Welcome to the Messy Wiring Club...membership in the thousands...lol
Have not started it yet on my tiny layout, and I am planning to join the OCD club and be neat. At least I hope it works out to be neat
I know an N scaler who was a civil engineer before he retired. His wiring is so neat that when I visit his layout I just stare at the bottom of his layout. My wiring, on the other hand, looks like a bowl of copper spaghetti.
Well, it isn't all in color-coded PVC pipe or anything. But you have to lie on your back to see any of it.
Well I am a Civil Engineer whose wiring look broadly like the photo, OCD or not! When I started, nothing was certain, and electrics were (are) a world mystery, so all my cables were cut looong, 'just in case'. Oh then I added cab control and local isolation zones etc..... My greatest railroad excitements have been watching slightly unbelieving as a loco runs successfully through a complex set of switches. 'How the heck did I do that?' is the accompanying thought! Donald Sent from my D5803 using Tapatalk
Hilarious!!! I had a layout in my hot garage for about ten years. Funny thing is when I tore it out I did not realize that I failed to solder or protect in any way many of the track feeder connections. Many connections were simply twisted around the DCC bus wires and the layout ran quite well. I did have it color coordinated if that qualifies as organized, but neat it was not. Zug, you're in good company, but for reliability and trouble shooting sake a little organization goes along way. Color consistency was always my savior.
Being in Ntrak I patterned my layout after it. It is not modular but is sectional and can be taken apart and reassembled in a shorter version. Therefore everything is sectionalized from the track to the wiring. Everything is self contained in the particular section with jumpers to the adjoining sections. For wiring I use the Power Pole connectors that are now standard with Ntrak.. They are inexpensive and color coded. Red on red and black on black, it doesn't get any easier than that. All switches are thrown manually. Most of the layout depicts a single track railroad traveling through an uninhabited country side typical of the Appalachian region with only a few buildings scattered here and there. These are not lit. This keeps the wiring to a minimum
Define neatness...........as long as the wire provide current to run the locos and they don't catch the house on fire, not to mention that they are usually hidden underneath the layout............
My wiring evolved with no scheme in mind other than dropping leads with consistency...red on one side, black on the other. But wires are all over the place, then I started installing terminal strips which reduced some of the madness. Now I'm going to make wholesale changes to the layout which will necessitate removal of track and wiring so I can start over. I'll look at it as practice.
Somewhere in the middle, me thinks..... My main layout is getting old, but it still shows hard lessons from my first one where it was a wire explosion. It's six tables that can be moved and separated, and EVERY WIRE between section goes to a soldered, Moulex-style 12-pin plug. And every power-source (if not destination) comes off a standard terminal strip on every table, so whatever I'm wiring to as a power source ties to a per-table standard. It's pretty well color-coded, but only as far as function; i.e. all track circuits are one set, all switches another set, etc. EVERY connection is soldered, no exceptions. All panels are removable by the same plug system. All power supplies are removable. It's a horrifically-complicated layout, DC-two cab plus two yard cabs, but every turnout is under-table remote (capacity discharge) except for lightly-used industrials with ground throws. Yards are all diode-matrix with clearly-labelled route boards. Every controlled-turnout has lit position indicator lights to the local panels (there are four separate zone panels). Now add in position lights for all the hidden track, polarity indicators for all the reverse loops. Now add in street and building lighting, special effects, and sound. Now, add in additional contacts for a fully-functional signal system that is route-dependent based on switch position and CTC panel direction. Terminal strips are labelled. So despite what started out to be some fairly high standards, it's evolved into a fairly massive, and nearly untraceable system simply with VOLUME - you can only pack so many wires in a certain amount of space and still follow anything. But at least it's fairly reliable. The least-reliable things are the contacts on the Lambert HO switch machines that power indicator and signal lights. When those get cranky, signals drop or panel lights drop, and my operating rules say STOP. I've been able to track stuff down and repair it, but when I redid my entire signal system from bulbs to tricolor LED's I literally ran into the 'WHAT WAS I THINKING WHEN I WIRED THIS!!!!' and found circuits and connections that I could neither trace or understand and would actually disconnect just to figure out what I was trying to do at the time. Wire cutters are not intended as diagnostic tools. My previous door-size layout had a rolling control console with an umbilical cord of wiring between it and the layout so that it could roll underneath. That was just a disaster as sooner or later a wire would break off deep inside the massive wrapped cable from regular movement. That really was untraceable, and you'd simply run a new wire on the outside. So it's better, but I hold no illusions - I can still completely baffle myself by what I did 20+ years ago. Even my little portable modules, which started as epic simple, have slowly slid toward chaos. The original 1976 Hickory Valley was dirt-simple as a single-cab loop-to-loop. But now that there are three modules, any of which can be run stand-alone or linked together, it got complex. So now I've had to add master control DPDT's so that the main line polarity is assigned to just one panel DPDT - somewhere - and there's a master polarity bus between modules. Those of you at Altoona got to watch what happened when I flopped-over one Moulex bus connector, and discovered that I could instantly short out everything with a random flop of the main line bus DPDT's, with no hope of recovery!!!! I thought I had Moulex-pinned those so that couldn't possibly possibly happen?? Well, no..... And the most INCREDIBLE wiring mess I've ever made also surfaced at Altoona when my policy of electrofrogs and Tortoises collided directly with a single dead brain moment when a powered locomotive crossed into frog polarity against a switch and simply shorted out everything on the entire railroad. One of my gearhead Climaxes silently crept into a frog polarity gap and shut me down for about 30 minutes while I approached mental spontaneous combustion. You know that scene in Christmas Vacation where Chevy Chase looses it with the lights??? Yeah. Like that. I'd grade myself A- on reliability, D+ on traceability, C- on neatness.
Well it is good to know I'm not alone.. After seeing so my photos and videos of layout (been watching Tracks Ahead shows I recorded years ago) and so many were super neat, but I suppose us less organized wirers don't take photos of it to show off.. My main DCC track lines ate 12 awg house wire on the white and black, I use the bare and a separate single wire that runs along the main wire as the AC for switches. the messy part is taking feeds of those main wires to power the tracks and the various small lights and stuff, it's hard to do a graceful transition from tiny 30 gauge wires on lights and Atlas snap-coils to heavy wires, even just 22agw telephoto wire. I like to use the old solder ring terminal straps like you see on old radios and TVs.. but the store that sold them when I started in to model trains years ago is long gone. When screwed in place, they make a stable place to solder tiny wires to and meet us with most any size of wire to go distance. , not it's just solder the tiny wire to the big stuff, tape it and a couple hits with the staple gun to hold the wires so it doesn't rip out of the device..
Not very neat -- but am slowly working on rewiring underneath. This is one of my favorite parts about working with FreeMo-N modules, very easy to do wiring, since you can lay each module on its side on your work bench Here's what the "old" underside has looked like for 6+ years
