Craig's Shed: Park Road Good Shed

Sunday, January 24, 2016

Park Road Good Shed

This week (Monday morning) I may have received some copies of some plans which will (and did) come in handy with building one of the Park Road goods sheds. From those plans and the measurements on them I was able to scale the plans to HO scale, so the trusty photocopier at work allowed me to scale one drawing to 54% and another to 80% and I had two HO scale plans to work from. On Tuesday night at our fortnightly group meeting I brought along that start of one of the frames/trusses that will form one of the 8 trusses that will hold the shed together. On Thursday night I completed that frame.

On Friday evening, I made my way to the local hobby shop (Austral Modelcraft) to collect some additional styrene that I needed to complete the other 7 frames/trusses. Unfortunately, they only had 3 of the 5 packets I required. Anyway this was enough to complete another 4 trusses. On Saturday after checking another local hobby shop after hearing that they had a styrene display, I found out that they were also out of 0.080” x 0.080” styrene. So my contingency plan, while my styrene building juices were flowing was to call on my local Styrene Hoarder/Distributer – Raymond. He had two of the packets that I was after, so upon a quick visit and viewing Lefty and Raymond's layout for about 30 minutes I returned home to complete the next 3 trusses. When Ray gets his next styrene shipment in, I will replace the styrene that I borrowed from Raymond. I do have a great groups of helpful friends.

Today I started with building in the end wall frames on two of the trusses and that has now been completed. Again I am out of two more sizes of styrene. I am hoping that Austral Modelcraft will be open tomorrow and I will pick up a few more packets of 2”x 4” and possibly 2” x 6” to assist with this scale construction to join all the trusses together and then make the structure free standing. The roof will hopefully give the structure some strength so it can be handled quite easily.

So for the last few days I have been "measure, measure, measure, cut, cut, cut, dab, dab, dab, place, place, place". A very repetitive activity with a good result so far, as close to the same as the original structure was built according to the plan, except where styrene dimensions have not matched, and I have gone to the next size up.

Six of the trusses from the Park Road Goods Shed

The two outer trusses from the Park Road Good Shed.

On Friday this week, I had the pleasure of catching a lift with Bob and Arthur and travelling to Bill Dunn’s layout at Maleny. Also there was Peter Kennedy and we had an Operating Session and some fantastic hospitality. In this ops session, Bill normally circulates two trains around the layout on his two main lines - called the main and the suburban, and operators have to run their trains in between these uncontrolled trains. Trains are controlled by a card system that advises what you need to do, where to start from, where to get your loco from and what type of loco, where to get your train or how to make up your train, where to pick up, and drop off if your are a good train or where to stop if you are a passenger. Most importantly, it tell you where to go, where to wait while keeping a lookout for other trains at various home signals. One interesting fact about Bill's layout is that all trains circulate in the same direction, except on the Branch line which is bi-directional. As you run your train, you change points in front of your train and return those points for the main when you pass those points. It is quite different to other sessions I have operated at other layouts and it was a great day with top class company. The layout was pretty smicko as well.