Get the free passport ds 64 printable form

hey everyone I'm Steve Brown well that's my railroad and sometimes I get sidetracked hey welcome to sidetracked this is the place we keep the stuff that doesn't exactly fit in with one of our project builds but we wanted to share with you anyway so if you're new here consider subscribing in a previous video we talked a little bit about the operations on the Brown Smith railroad its main operation which is moving cars to and from switch junction in the port and at that time we introduced our two auto reversing loops and our two automated turnouts that allow us to have continuous operation on a single line main it's a lot of fun especially if you like to rail fan your own trains like I do but in a follow up video we talked about the digit Rex air one and how we use that to reverse polarity on the two loops so today I'd like to talk about the two automated turnouts that we have on the layout and as we do we're going to introduce to you the digitrax DX 64 stationary decoder the digitrax BD 4 block detector senses where the trains are out and then we're gonna reduce to you the tortoise switch motors okay so at the onset here just a little disclaimer I am NOT going to introduce to you all the features and how to program the devices that I'm going to show you here that we're using on the BS are the instruction manuals are pretty good on this and there's some videos out there that'll teach us some of those subtleties and I'll try to link some of those in the description down below but I found when I was trying to figure out how to do all this that some of the the wiring videos weren't that great and I took me a while to figure out how to connect this stuff together so what I'm gonna do here is I'm just going to show you how these devices operate and how we get the wiring done to make all that happen okay to sense where the trains are going we're using the digit X B d4 which I'm going to show you just a second it's a block detector that will sense where the trains are but in order to do that you have to have some isolated rails now the case of the BSR I already had all this track laid and there wasn't really a way to put an isolated rail joiners but I needed to break the track in essence here here here and here so that I could isolate pieces of the track now what I had to do to do that was basically I took my dremel tool with the cutoff wheel on it and went right down to a joint where a rail Joyner was and cut right through boom I intend to put some plastic or something in there later and then you know paint it or something but for now the trains just run over that gap just fine I don't really have any problems with it it just kind of looks dumb but if you look at the layout close enough so once I cut the rails I was able to isolate the track into two zones or two blocks basically this one and this one now it's time to introduce the B D for the BD for is a block...