Up the Creek Column - 10
South Jackson Gazette
Unwarranted movement of trains!
Patrons of the South Jackson
Tavern are abuzz with the lat-
est news from the railroad.
According to lots of rail-
road employees it seems the
BC&SJ, which has for a num-
ber of years relied upon track
warrants to dispatch trains,
has begun the process of
switching to a newer system.
Explained Horace Fithers,
authority on nearly every-
thing, "The crews on the rail-
road sure were getting fed up
having to wait and wait all
the time fer the dadgum dis-
patcher to get them their next
trackwarrant. There they'dbe,
cooling their heels and perus-
ing the latest S.J. Gazette and
nuthing was comin' in on the
radio. Making it worse, usu-
ally they'dknowthereweren't
no traffic ahead of them an'
the delays were only that high
falutin' dispacherator being
dang slow gittin them their
next authority, again."
A clipping from the
"So when railroad manage-
ment announced they were
going to try a new system
where the crews ain't depen-
din' on the DS to tell 'emwhen
to come and go each and
every time, well it jest brought
smiles out most everywhere!"
Charlie Comstock, superin-
tendent of nearly everything,
commented when reached,
"We believe the new system
represents the ultimate in
railroad operation technol-
ogy, and besides, with all the
radios turned on it got so loud
trackside you couldn't hear
yourself think. And now the
crews can demonstrate a bit
more of that perfessionalism
they keep talking about."
This reporter certainly hopes
things work out as well as
planned and everything runs
more smoothly.
*
Enjoy the Gazette? Read more at
I was using rotary switches from my electronics scrap box. It
turned out they were make-before-break. That is, if the rotary
switch was set for the red aspect, when I turned it to yellow,
it made contact with yellow before the red was disconnected.
This momentary short of the red and yellow wires would
sometimes confuse the Dual 3-Way. The solution was simple, I
further rumaged around in my electronics scrap box and even-
tually found a break-before-make rotary switch. Now the sema-
phore blades moved properly. Well, almost...
The haunted semaphores
Two nights later I was shooting photos of the semaphore for
this column. What had worked perfectly before now exhibited
an amazing problem. When I put either semaphore in its yel-
low aspect, it promptly changed from yellow to red all by itself!
An e-mail to Tam Valley's proprietor went unanswered (it turns
out Duncan was on vacation). I called my good buddy and elec-
tronics whiz Geoff. We discussed what might be wrong.
At this point I was confident my panel wiring was correct. In
a previous e-mail Duncan had recommended that I not use
twisted pair wires for the cables connecting the control panel
to the servo controller;
"It would be better to have each wire separated than twisted
together. Twisted pair is propagating differential signals like DCC
but it will promote crosstalk in the case of the Dual 3-Way."
This left me speculating about wire capacitance in the new, (non-
twisted pair) wiring). Given there was only 12' of wire, it seemed
surprising to me wire capacitance could cause such a problem.
MRH-Oct 2013
