Dedicated Programming Track

This is my first post in quite a while.  The past several months have been quite busy!  I was recently married to a lovely woman, Patty, that I have been seeing over the past year, and model railroading, particularly updating my blog, has not been high on my priority list!

Patty and I dancing the Waltz at our favorite local winery, South Creek Vineyards.

Having said that, my wife Patty is supportive of my hobby/passion, and will be going to the upcoming Narrow Gauge Convention in Minneapolis-St. Paul in September!

One of the items that I accomplished recently was installing a dedicated programming track on my layout.  This is the first dedicated programming track that I have had, and it was well worth figuring out how to incorporate such an item into my layout.  This track is an existing track servicing the turntable, and was particularly suited because it had already been isolated from adjacent tracks, as they were part of the reversing loop on the layout.  The following electrical diagram of the Durango Yard portion of my railroad will illustrate the location of the programming track.

Figure 1.  Electrical diagram of the Durango Yard.  The green tracks are District 1; the blue tracks are District 2; and the red tracks are the reversing section, controlled by a DCC Specialties OG-AR circuit board.  The Purple track is the programming track.

Figure 2.  Detailed view of the Durango Yard showing the location of the Programming Track (in purple), the reversing section (in red), and District 1 (in green).  

The programming track is electrically isolated from the rest of the layout by gaps in both rails where it joins the turnout in the reversing section.  Obviously, the track is gapped at the turntable!  The track is fed trough a DPDT electrical switch mounted on the layout fascia,  In one position, the track acts simply as a normal section of trackage; in the "Programming" position, the track is a dedicated programming track.  I chose this track as it is near the location of my NCE DCC system, and that simplified wiring.  Also, because I use JMRI Decoder Pro to program my decoders, I wanted the Program track to be near the DCC system and my laptop computer.