I have power to the lower deck. Track (orange), controls (blue), and accessories (green) buses are routed down from the upper deck behind the backdrops to the lower deck. There is a corresponding lower deck terminal point for each of the upper deck terminal points except at the helix and in staging, which has yet to be built. Here they are circled in red. Most drops are straight down except the ones denoted with lines. Terminal point 12 is routed from terminal point 11 as the upper deck terminal point 12 was already full.
The power drops are of the same construction as the upper deck buses – 12AWG solid copper THHN wire with soldered ring terminals. I emptied the original spool of white wire and had to get another spool from which I probably used 20′. That means somewhere on the layout there is now over 500′ of 12 gauge white wire! The spools of orange, blue, and green appear 3/4 used up so I am guessing there is a total of around 1,600 feet of 12 gauge wire in the layout now. That’s a whole lot of wire. As a side note, the price of wire has almost tripled since I bought the original spools in 2014.
As it turns out I didn’t have to take down any backdrops to install the power drops. It was tight but there was just enough space to work in the gap at the upper deck using a long screwdriver. A little tedious but better than removing and reinstalling the backdrops.
Terminal 1
Terminal 2
Terminal 3
Terminal 4
Terminal 5
Terminal 6
Terminal 7
Terminal 8
Terminal 9
Terminal 10
Terminal 11
Terminal 12
