Ballasting at Kyogle Continues

Not much time was spent on railway related activities this weekend, as my daughter had tickets to see a boy band in the city on Saturday night.  As such we stayed in town for the night just 1 block away from the Brisbane Convention and Exhibition Centre concert by 5SOS was held.  If you don’t know who or what 5SOS are, you are too old.  My son even had a swim in the hotel outdoor pool and apparently it was quite warm in there.

Anyway, I went to the Club for our monthly meeting on Saturday morning, before coming home very early after the meeting and then catching a bus back into town to meet up with the family at the hotel.  Back at the Club, we had a good Club Meeting.  There is plenty of activity occurring at the Club with work occurring on both the HO and N scale clubroom layout, and plenty of trains circulating.

Today after getting home from the city, following a free ferry ride round the city, and a walk through two markets in the city, I went down to the shed this arvo and continued ballasting Kyogle.  Kyogle is a bit of a pain as the trackwork at this location is probably the most inaccessible of the whole layout.  Last week I was ballasting from the northern end of the location, to as far I could reach from the front of the layout.  This weekend, I was doing the southern end of the Kyogle Loop, from an access point between the Running Creek blob and the Fairy Hill Loop.  I’m not looking forward to the next section (the middle of the Kyogle Loop) as I will have to do the really hard bit which is hard to reach from each end.  I have to jump through a few hoops (almost) to get into two access hatches so I can reach the yet to be ballasted section.  Today, as I didn’t feel like doing the limbo to get into those access hatches, I just delayed it, and put it off until next weekend.

To keep busy in the shed, I made up about 26 small wooden handles and installed them onto the actuation wires on the manual push-pull wires in Glenapp Loop, The Risk Loop, Border Loop, Kyogle Loop and Fairy Hill Loop.  I will eventually paint these so everyone can see them, and they will follow the same code, so everyone knows what they will be used for. So the up end may be one colour, the down end maybe another colour and cross overs another, and access to a siding another colour again.  I will think about this and maybe discuss with some of my Tuesday Night friends this week.

This week we head over to Bob’s place on Tuesday and I’m looking forward to see his track laying progress.  I will also pick up one of his excess HWO wagons, from the 1990 period, for a very fair price.  That wagon fits my layout timeline very well.