It’s been slow past few days – I squandered some of my time-off doing nothing, or driving around getting things, or just having hard time focusing. Maybe I should not be feeling guilty about it, time-off is supposed to be time off things, all of them. Oh well, onto the trains now.

For the past couple of weeks I’ve been experimenting with various methods of block occupancy detection. As I plan to have the entire railroad detectable (for automation purposes) and it’s a mid-size layout, there will be many, many (…many) blocks (probably a hundred or so across 3 decks). I built couple of circuits, namely the single transistor one based off of NCE BD20 and modified by Reinhard Müller, and another based on a similar Current Transformer detector but with a LM555, originally from Paisley, with modifications from Helmut Schäfer.

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I hate it when I spend the whole day driving around looking for things, especially on my days off when I plan to make progress on the layout. But it seems inevitable, as many of these businesses I cater to are only open Monday to Friday 9-5 –  right when I’m at work.

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Via what has now become a “legendary” parcel delivery, because Fedex held onto it for 2 weeks at their local depot 20 km away. Idiots! I wish people would open their eyes and stop using CrapEx and OOPS, clearly sending them a message about their abhorrent service they provide to normal people (you, me, everyone else who’s not a big corporation).
Despite Canada Post rolling strikes, I still got postal parcels delivered ahead of these courier services. Huge praises to Canada Post…we must never allow it to be privatized.

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