The past few months have been pretty busy doing a lot of little fixes, working on the CMRI signal system to troubleshoot an addressing issue, and one BIG project!
Having recently acquired the original map board from Ridgely Tower I set up to build a Saxby & Farmer lever bed. I located an excellent article on how to design the locking bed and have finished building it using Evergreen Scale Models strip styrene. I'm very pleased with the results all though some of my locking bar cuts aren't as "pretty" as I'd like them to be but it's going to be out of sight anyway so I'm not TOO worried. The locking bed will be connected to inputs on the CMRI to communicate lever position to JMRI/PanelPro which will handle the logic.
I reveresed-engineered the original Ridgely lever manipulation chart, eliminted the "spare" levers and ended up with a 22-lever frame. The locking bed will be operated using a set of Humpyard Purveyance (www.humpyard.com) which, amazingly enough, have EXACTLY the amount of throw necessary to move the locking bars!
The sad thing is that we just can't seem to get enough operators and with gas prices heading way beyond reasonable I'm not expecting this situation to improve any time soon. This has me seriously considering scaling back the railroad, dismantling and focusing on either the Chicago Terminal end or Springfield and developing more of a switching railroad which won't require nearly as many oeprators... Stay tuned!
This project has been a lot of fun so I will turn my sites toward equipping Iles, Wood River, and JO (S. Joliet) towers with these as well! It was a real challenge to build but, in the end, it has provided a good, learning experience!
