I’ll be using DCC on the PM&TCo. so the wiring is pretty straightforward. I ran two feeder bus wire roughly parallel to the mainline track from one end of the module to the other. On the recommendation of the Digitrax group, these bus wires are solid 12 gauge copper. Such a large wire is necessary to keep voltage losses down.

Each piece of rail has a 18 gauge solid copper feeder wire. It may be overkill but at 5 minutes per feeder, it didn’t take me long to install them all for the module. I tried Tony Koester’s approach of attaching the feeder like a spike to the side of the rail as described in the August 1998 issue of Model Railroader. It works quite well and after I painted the shiny parts black to match the rails, they all pretty much disappeared. The advantage of ‘feeder-as-a-spike’ approach is that you can add the feeders after the track was been laid.

Connecting the feeder and the bus was done with 3M Scotchlok IDC wire connectors, model 567. The only soldering required was to wire the feeders and the frog wire to the microswitch for the turnout control. These connectors are not the easiest to find; in the US, try Mouser Electronics; in Canada, try Electrosonic.