Lots of Detail Items to be Worked on

This week's modelling activities started on Tuesday when we went over to David’s place for our fortnightly gathering to check on progress on his layout.  David has ripped everything up and started again.  Some baseboards along two walls of his shed have been rebuilt, but there is still a long way to go.

 

On Saturday afternoon many of the Tuesday Nighters had the opportunity to head down to Darren’s place for a look at what he has been doing lately.  He has ballasted quite a bit of track and installed some very nicely detailed scenery.  A few guys took the opportunity to run a train from one end of his layout to the other and back again. 

We had a great time just sitting down and watching some video that Darren took back in 1992 of a trip on the NSW standard gauge line between Clapham Yard and Grafton.  The footage was taken about 1 year after era my layout was set in.  The footage was inspiring.  It was very nice to see some of the scenes through the various crossing loops that I have modelled looking pretty close to the mark.  I’m sure that some of the guys who were there watching the video thought that my layout was not as accurate to the prototype as it is until they saw some of these great scenes.

 

As I mentioned it was inspiring looking at this footage.  So I spent most of today in the shed working on creating a few detail items to be installed around the layout.  I purchased some additional styrene on Saturday morning and cut up about 32 x 12' foot fence posts from 0.080" styrene rod.  These were painted silver when the afternoon cleared up.  I also cut up about 39 x 0.060" 'I' beam fence posts and drilled 5 wire holes in each.  I also cut up 12 x 44 gallon drums from brass tube.  I also cut up about 15 x 44 gallon drums from styrene tube.  I placed a few fruit trees around the layout in some back yards of various houses.  I dug out a few benches and placed two in the local cemetery and about 7 more on the Cassino Platform.  I decided that I needed to build a set of stairs in the Cassino cemetery to go from the car park down to the grave site.  I plan to put a classic old country church in the next allotment to the cemetery.  I also placed an old picnic table in the cemetery for mourners to sit and reflect at.

I then went digging in some of my old modelling boxes and found another 20 or so 44 gallon drums for installation in the various fettler camps that I will be installing.  I also pulled out about 7 or 8 classic corrugated iron sheds that will be distributed to various fettlers camps around the layout.  I will also need to make up a few toilets and various piles of clutter for these camps.

This detail driver was inspired by watching the video at Darren's yesterday and just understanding that some of these crossing loops were miniature microcosms of activity instead of being a desolate site.

Last Monday being the ANZAC day public holiday I also got down the shed and listened to the Brisbane march on the TV.  While that was on, I cut up 72 fence posts from 0.060" styrene 'I' beam and drilled 5 holes in each post.  The fencing contractors then installed the fence posts for the line side fencing from the Cemetery to near Fairy Lane.  I also did some investigation into my raspberry pi issue.  It turned out that my mouse was stuffed.  So I replace that and then I could do what I wanted on my pi.  However, my aim of configuring the fast clock in JMRI on the pi to sync to the NCE system could not be done.  My version of the JMRI was quite old and the relevant code was not operational in that version.  So I have graciously asked Greg to download the latest version for me and install it on the micro SD card and then I will set about configuring the fast clock then.

Tomorrow, being another public holiday in Queensland, I will be working on installing the corrugated iron cladding for the Park Road goods shed.  I think this will be a challenge.