It Woulda Been a Good One...

Sometime in March 2004 — about four months after we began building the layout — we made the decision to move to a new house. The reasons are varied, but the bottom line is we’ll be moving back to Barrington, Rhode Island sometime during the summer of 2004.

As far as we could get it in the time we had...

I had been hoping that a functioning train layout might give our house a certain je ne sais quois in terms of showing it to prospective buyers. Our real estate agent had other ideas, however.

“We need to put back the formal living room,” she said.

A lot had been done, but there was still a lot to do.

If we had continued, the girls were going to start assembling and laying out Plasticville, and I was going to do the wiring. Normally, this is one of my favorite parts of layout building...

...but this wasn’t a normal layout! The two photos above, particularly the one at the top, point out a design problem that should be plain for all to see. It was so plain, in fact, that I’m not sure how I missed it when making the first sketches of the layout. It was the ultimate “duh” moment!

When you build a layout by placing two tables along opposite walls of a room and then connect the tables with two bridges, you give yourself a monumental wiring challenge. Specifically, unless you split your control panel and transformers so that one set services each table, there is no obvious way to bring power and control to both tables.

In the top photo, you can see that our options were:

Running a thick cable around the perimeter of the door jamb;
Prying up one of the hardwood floor boards and running the cable beneath the floor; or
Running a table-to-table cable underneath one of the bridges, through a multi-pin plug & socket combo.

Prying up hardwood flooring in the oldest room in the house wasn’t ever going to be an option. Since I counted over 100 distinct wires that would need to cross from table to table, I thought the thickness of the resulting cable would be too big to go around the door jamb as well. That left us with the plug & socket solution.

A quick glance at the objects on this page only starts to tell the story
of the wiring challenge we created for ourselves.
Let’s see.....that’s four wires each for the O22 switches, four each for the UCS tracks,
six for the gantry crane, six for the coal ramp, at least one for each light bulb you can see.....

I looked around the Internet for multi-pin connectors to help solve the problem. The usual suspects in the toy train community (i.e., Mouser, AllElectronics, etc.) didn’t really have anything that helped.

Somewhere in my research, I came across Amphenol, a supplier of industrial strength 100+ pin connectors for the entertainment, marine, and transportation industries. Some of Amphenol’s larger units offered more than 200 connections via a single plug/socket combination.

While I didn’t relish the thought of soldering all those wires to a connector, it seemed to be a solution that would offer the cleanest and neatest solution to our wiring problem.

A view from where the control panel was to be built.

But, alas, the table-to-table wiring problem was one that I only had to think about. This particular problem was never actually solved because it wasn’t too long before we finalized our decision to move. As far as our layout went, we bit the bullet, disassembled everything, and packed it all up again.

Before we took it apart, however, I gathered the girls for a last set of pictures. These ranged from the serious...

to the goofy...

The girls mug it up with a bottle of track cleaner to commemorate their hard work.

On May 15, 2004, just before disassembly, I took most of the detailed photos shown on this page.

We’ll just have to imagine the rumbling sound the trains made when rolling across these spans...

We broke it all down and packed it up a few days after these pictures were taken.

Perhaps the saddest part of all was that our layout, which had taken us almost four months to put together, was dismantled, packed, and put in storage in a single weekend.

The sawmill nestled back in its box between a Blue Comet and
modern era Virginian TrainMaster.

The silver lining to this story is that we all ended up being glad that we had started our family layout before we decided to move. The enjoyable and rewarding experience underscored the need to look only at houses with adequate room for the trains.

Like every “next layout”, ours is going to be the greatest ever.