Thanks Matt! As Ted mentioned, I kind of got carried away with the custom track work. I posted fairly extensively above about the O/On30 dual gauge in Owenyo. Following on that I decided to build O/On3 dual gauge in our HIGHLY compressed representation of Leadville, CO. O/On3 is much more difficult than O/On30 because the "center" rails ends up farther off center. We have to restrict both the motive power and cabooses (because of differences in pick-up rollers) to a hand full of equipment that has been tested to run on the off-center center rail. It's also the only part of the layout with less than O-72 3-rail curves. The curves in the wye are roughly O-42.
Compared to the Leadville Wye, Owenyo was a piece of cake. Owenyo has two custom crossings with no moving parts. Leadville has four dual gauge switches, two hand laid On3 narrow gauge switches, and an On3 crossover that shifts the On3 from sharing one outside rail to the other in the middle of the wye. I'm glad I did it just to prove I could, but I NEVER intend to do it again. All totaled it took about five weeks of work to lay the track in Leadville.
We've run both O and On3 equipment through all the track work, but never at the same time. Right now the NWTL's Precision Scale On3 Climax is still a DC locomotive. Leadville is now wired and connected to AC track power with DCS. I recently purchased one of MTH's new HO GP-35's with Protosound 3E+, which is designed for Marklin HO 3-rail AC operation. We'll be cannibalizing the GP-35's electronics to convert the On3 Climax to AC operation on DCS. Once that's done we'll be able to operate O and On3 engines simultaneously in Leadville without any toggling between power sources.
