I have started laying track in my staging area and figured that I should start planning for power distribution sooner rather than later.  This staging area is a 24' long "L" shape through staging.  Each throat will be it's own power block as will each staging track and the through track.  I will end up with 8 power blocks in this one power district.  I am planning on using the Tam Valley Depot 5 Amp DCC Booster Board (DAB002) for power and a circuit breaker specifically for this power district.

I am confronting wiring up the 40 odd turnouts in my layout and am curious as to the tradeoffs between using frog juicer circuitry to power my frogs or the switched contacts on the turnout motors? I am using both Tortoise motors and Atlas solenoids -- the later on the upper shelf of my layout. Motive power is pretty much all short wheelbase steam, so powered frogs to avoid turnout stalling seems pretty much mandatory. Using the contacts provides deterministic frog polarity where as the frog juicer appears indeterminate as it is driven by short detection.

Hello All, Our 5th week of work and we ave about a 3rd of the layout up. Last week we built a 3 turn helix using spline roadbed. It looks GREAT and the trains move up and down perfectly. This week we are going to put electrical drops in and continue laying track.