NTS&B Some more challenges

It's been a busy month, so not much visible progress has been made on the layout. Instead, I have been concentrating on a couple operation issues. First my friend Scottie brought over a 'little' train car so I could check for clearances. The car is a scale model of a modern Pulp Wood car, and is about 19 inches long, with the trucks right on the end of the car. My clearance checker is about the same length, but has the trucks set back in like a passenger car. His car has much more overhang, so caused me quite a bit of grief. It caused me to move a couple bridges on the outer mainline, and some support for the upper tracks over my figure 8 loop. Other than the inner main line, it will not run on any other loop at this time, and it is doubt full it ever will. A picture of the car, along with 15 inch aluminum and more normal 12 inch passenger car is shown below.

Monster pulp wood car next to 15 inch and over 12 inch passenger car.

The second problem I had I noticed during the last club meeting held here. My winter area accessory lights kept cycling on and off. The problem was caused by 2 houses containing color wheels to give the affect of Christmas lights were drawing too much current. My first attempt at a fix was to run separate power to them, and using an HO transformer to power up only those 2 houses. It turned out that the 2 houses alone were causing too much current for that transformer, also. I then resorted to changing out the light bulbs in the houses. It turns out they were both using high intensity 10 watt halogen bulbs. I swapped them out and used the standard Lionel 'Christmas Light' bulbs that are used in the newer engines, and putting the houses back to the original transformer. The bulbs draw a whole lot less current, and are still sufficiently bright enough to create the desired effect. The picture below shows 1 of the houses with its original light bulb.

Christmas house with original bulb