Remaking of the Ridley Keystone & Mountain

[UP SD40-2]

Tom, run your buss wires all under the layout just as you would for DCC, NOW, you have your DCC power pack lines, positive, and ground, put a toggle switch on the pos, and one on the neg, now place a wire from those to the pos buss wire under your layout, and the neg to the neg buss wire under the layout. NOW, do the exact same thing to you pos and neg wires coming from your DC power pack. 

NOW, when you want to run DCC, flip the pos and neg toggle switches on for your DCC, BE SURE TO TURN OFF THE DC TOGGLE SWITCHES, you would do the same exact thing for your DC power pack if you want to run DC.

ONE OTHER IMPORTANT THING, ANY TRACK that is holding an engine MUST BE "BLOCKED", what I mean is be sure to put plastic rail joiner in on pos wire on the engine holding tracks, or I just simply cut each pos rail on a holding track to stop power, put a toggle switch on each holding track so you can turn the power on and off depending on if the engine is DCC or DC, FREIGHT CARS DONT COUNT, they dont have power so tracks just holding freight cars need not to have toggles, IE yard tracks or industries. 

Might seem like a lot to do, but think about this, you only have to do it once, and now you dont have to DCC every single engine you have, saving you money   . Lets face it, there are engines I love to run a lot, then there are engines I love, but honestly dont run that often, if you have a lot of engines, like myself, its 100x cheaper to do as I have. I DCC the engines I run the most.

HOWEVER, if your running DCC operated switches, DCC operated signals, or things of the like, simply disregard everything I wrote above and consider it time lost that you'll never get back   . 

Hope this helps