This long, skinny section of layout is hard to photograph, but here's almost the entire section. All the ties have been glued to the plywood.

The trackplan is fairly obvious now. The lower-right hand section comes off of the turntable and feeds this part of the layout. A run-around is provided for the switching work to be done at the two industrial spurs. The upper-left and lower-left spurs are where the two industries will be placed.

I sanded the ties smooth using a sanding block. That knocked off a couple of ties, so they were glued back. These things happen sometimes.

Based on my experience from my Crystal Creek module (where I handlaid track and built the turnouts in-place), turnouts are the hardest part, especially the throwbar and the Tortoise installation. This time I decided to focus on them first.

The first order of business is to drill the holes for the actuator rods of the Tortoises that will control these turnouts.

Given the location of the hole, I could now install the Tortoises. I used to wait until after the track was in place before installing the Tortoises, but they are a real pain to install upside-down. This time, I flipped the section over and had easy access. I used the drilling template that comes with the Tortoise to mark the mounting holes to be drilled given the hole I just drilled from above. The photo on the right shows a Tortoise installed.

However, before I did that, I widened the hole from underneath by using a larger drill bit. This gives the actuator rod more space to move under the layout.

Two of the four Tortoises installed.

Since they are installed, I figured it would be trivial to wire them up at the same time. I used a Digitrax DS44 (see my short article). These are the first four Tortoises on this layout, so they are numbered 1 through 4, which happens to be the default addresses for the four controllers of the DS44, so I didn't have to program it.

My intent is to preserve this section of the layout in case of a move, because this area is rather self-contained. That being the case, I decided to superglue the DS44 stationary decoder to one of the "legs" of this section. I also superglued a two-slotted barrier strip to the leg to act as the bridge between the wiring of the decoder and the rest of the layout.

As per the article referenced above, I soldered a 1-Kohm and a 680-ohm resistor between the "positive" lead of the decoder and the Tortoise. This drops the voltage down enough to where the Tortoise's gears are barely audible.

Next, I hooked up the barrier strip to the trackpower bus running under the layout and turned the system on. I checked the position of each of the Tortoises so that their direction of throw matched the eventual position of the throwbar. Two had to be adjusted (simply flipping the two wires on the Tortoise does the trick).

The nice thing is that one of the hardest jobs of getting track up and running is now done.