Thank you. Excellent article.
I have now added a dropout between the first and second fully connected layer. As expected, the training is much slower, but I am approaching an accuracy level that is appropriate to the task.
Just a side note - the really terrible performance I was seeing earlier was not due to the dropout but to my misunderstanding of BTNug’s suggestion. I had also added a softmax, not realizing that my loss function, Cross Entropy, ALREADY does a softmax transformation. When I removed the extra softmax, the training behaved more reasonably.
Thanks for your suggestions.