After a few weeks of testing (ie., running trains around and around), I decided that it is time to glue down the track. I am using the Woodland Scenics tacky glue. It was a big pain, since I need to pull the track up about an inch or so (with the feeder wires attached), paint the glue on the underside of the ties, and then push it down and weight it down, all before the glue dries. I could only do about 5 feet at a time. How do you keep the track down? You weigh it down with an MTH Allegheny, of course. And then any heavy object you can find. Eventually, I figured out that it works better to apply the glue to the roadbed. I have already covered all the ways NOT to do it, so it is going smoothly now.
Then I got to the crossover . . .
So, this was a pain, lifting up the crossover (with 4 tracks attached). Of course, both center rail power pickups pop out (remember all my failed attempts to feed the center rails?). Well, this was not going to work. So, out comes the soldering iron. Yeah, right!! Did you know that the blackened center rail is the only metal in the universe that solder will not stick to? Back to the drawing room. Finally the solution comes to me: Drill a hole through the vertical part of the rail, loop a copper wire through, and solder it to itself. Success!! And the solder even stuck to the drilled bare metal.
I fed the switch machine wires down through the table to wire them up, and then remembered that I don’t yet have a control panel. So, that will be the next project while I am waiting for each section of glue to dry. Fortunately, I have a borrowed Z-4000 to properly size the control panel. I am going to try to keep the panel size down to somewhere less than half the size of the layout . . .