Looking for ideas and opinions. I'm getting close to putting up a fascia on my railroad for a major classification yard. I've been thinking about the user interface. I'm assuming I'd want a track diagram of some sort, some toggles and/or pushbuttons to control turnouts and some LEDs to see the aspects of turnouts, etc. Is there some sort of skinny tape used for drafting or auto pinstriping or something that works well for the diagram or should this be painted on in some way? Other ideas?
Before I forget, I should mention that I'm DCC-based...using Digitrax.
Do you think LEDs are necessary in the fascia? Would look kind of nice, but takes 2 volts away from the drive power of the Tortoises I'm using. Also, on the turnouts, I'll have some that are "manual automatic" ( driven by a Tortoise but not connected to Digitrax in any way) and "fully automatic" (could be thrown by computer, if /when I'm ready to add that). The "manual automatics" I assume would be simple DPDT sub-mini toggles that reverse the power on the Tortoises directly. The "fully automatic" inputs go to a DCC device of some sort (like a Switch-IT or DS54 or whatever) and usually have to be momentary contacts to ground. I initially assumed these would be push buttons but then thought that wouldn't look that good because my fascia would have some toggles and some push buttons. Perhaps better would be SPDT momentary on toggles for the fully automatics, but I haven't been able to find any of those anywhere.
OK, sorry I rambled a bit. I'd appreciate whatever experience anyone would like to share. Links to good websites, articles, references to good auppliers of these kinds of parts (closest I've found is allelectronics.com), etc.
Thanx,
Vince