Under the table

 Well, the time has come to start addressing the control wiring for the main line and the yards. So, first I have to drop the leads from each switch to power the frogs and route the power to each track. Here you see the wires are in the holes through the road bed and have to be soldered to the rails. There are so many, it looks like I have color coded weeds.

 Each turnout takes a total of 7 wires to handle all the power routing. We have about 16 turnouts on this end of the yard so that was a lot of drops to put in.

 Under the yard, I am building the terminal strips for the power in and the power routing I will have to do. I will place the panel in front of this area but wanted to build this while it was in the open. I am not using DCC so that is why I have to have so many blocks. The track blocks are on the upper terminal strip.

 More colored weeds to deal with. The stripper is sitting on my paper record of what I am doing. I will never remember what I did if I do not write it down!

 The cabling underneath is growing. I have to keep the wires up to clear the trains on the lower level. Fortunately, most of the wring and switch motors are on the outer periphery of the yard.

 Now I have to pull the heavy 12 gauge power supply wires throughout the whole layout. This is my rig for feeding the wire that I am pulling. The color coded wire is the power side of the circuit. I actually have four main circuits.

 I pull about 10 feet at a time and then go back and pull more slack to allow me to go further. The resistance of the wire is pretty heavy due to its gauge so I have to do it in stages.

 Now I have top pull the ground wires for each power circuit. These are ribbon wires of up to 8 flat strands of 18 gauge. I reduce them to two pairs (four wires) and then mark the edge of the strand so I know what is the correct ground for a given circuit.

 Here is a self portrait of me marking at the wire with a black magic marker. It is rather tedious. The total time for the pull was about 6 hours. Unfortunately, something has happened underneath as I pulled the heavy wire by some turnout motors installed earlier and created a short. The power supply failed before I realized I had a problem. I have  rebuilt the power supply but I have not determined the source of the wiring problem. I have confirmed I have a problem but I do not know yet where it is.
 So, back to the panels and start disconnecting wires until I have eliminated the short. Then I will be able to solve it, once it is located. This is why things take time!