Tri-Wire Harness for DCC

I was going to call this piece "All Wired Up", but when I got to this stage I realised that I might be set upon by the DCC manufacturers for showing that two wires to the rail doesn't mean just two wires to wire the layout.

Now any beginners reading this, take a deep breath, let it out and relax. I really only have used three wires, and the third is only for the turnouts, but what I have done is wired this layout in a way that maximises the chances of it running without glitches from power not getting to all the rails.

Anyway, I started working on wiring the layout by doing the right hand board (North side of the layout) first as it had the fewest droppers, and only one turnout to do.



See not that bad heh? I then went on to the left side the layout as that had the next smallest number of droppers to wire up.

Okay that's a few more wiring runs, but you only ever do one-at-a-time, unless you have more than one pair of hands?  I start with the dropper furthest away from the bus bar point as it makes the process of threading the wires easier. What's a bus bar? It's where you collect all the wires together to solder them up, and I'll show this in another post.

Finally I tackled the centre board that has the largest number of droppers and turnouts to wire.

Now that's more like it! Loads of lovely wires to keep the juice flowing where it needs to go.

I've only coiled the wires like this, because the layout sits above our sofa, and I don't want my hair full of copper wire while we watch a film tonight. For those of you who are extra observant see if you can spot the two missing wire runs in the completed sections that I only noticed I hadn't done after I took the photographs.

And now I have a wiring harness, ho ho ho!