Tidying up Loose Ends

This week started when we all gathered outside Shelton’s place for the appointed hour to arrive before invading him.  Guess what?  He has changed his layout AGAIN!  However, the changes looks quite good.  The scenery continues to evolve, the trees multiply and the lit signals look very nice.  He has done a very good job of a dry creek bed.  A few suggestions were offered and maybe some might be accepted.  The operation of the signals which includes two setup for automatic operation, with these going from red to green and back to red as the train passes, looks very nice.

Just before I went to Shelton’s place, I visited my shed, and installed my ESU sound decoder back into my 2300 loco that I received back from Rocket in the post earlier that day.  I gave it a bit of a run and it seemed to work, although it was stuttering rather severely.  Maybe a combination of dirty track and dirty wheels.  So both were cleaned and the pickups on the Loco oiled in the same manner that I did to the Railbus, which fixed its running issues.

I was sick on Wednesday so went down to the shed in the afternoon.  I installed a snubber under the Acacia Ridge Yard feeders and another at the far end of South Brisbane Interstate Yard.  I will see how this works with the layout.  Sometimes we get some slow response in those areas.  I also did some minor work on a dual gauge point that I scratch built in the lead into Acacia Ridge Dual gauge yard.  This point, allows me to hide a standard gauge loco in this location when I need to do some shunting in the yard.  Basically I used a cutting disk to open up the flangeways.

I have also doing some work on the narrow gauge timetable.  I was desk checking the various trains and what they were dropping off where and who was picking those wagons up to ensure that everything got back to its original position on the layout.  It was then, that I realised that one of my 1720 class narrow gauge locos was in the wrong place.  So I had to add a local light engine movement from Clapham Yard to Acacia Ridge Yard.  I am thinking of moving a couple of trains starting locations.  So these timetable cards were updated.  The timetable has these trains entering and leaving from dead end tracks.  So towards the end of the timetable, I will add two movements inside Acacia Ridge Yard to allow the reversing of the loco on the coal and grains trains.  The length of these trains starting locations will limit these trains to 8 wagons maximum unless I do some more work in Acacia Ridge Yard.  That might allow me to take then to 10 or even 12 wagons.  I might look at this in the future.  Lengthening these trains will take quite a bit of saving of my hobby budget to accomplish.  The financial controller is starting to tighten her grip on my finances.  

Thursday I had a scheduled day off work, and in the afternoon I cut out the centre section of more than three dozen give way signs.  I broke about a third of them in the process.  So I had to glue then back together.  I then painted the resultant triangles red ready to affix to the various sign posts.  I will then package them up for a couple of mates and then have a couple for the May Show to sell off.  I also returned about 4 locos to the layout that had been in a travel box which I took to the Club last month.  Now I just need to remember where I took the locos from.

On Friday I updated the timetable spreadsheet and printed out two new copies for next weekend.  One for the North Coast Controller and one for the operators to take from.  I was very lucky that some weeks back now, Darren provided me some new reams sheets of A4 4 part paper that I use for the timetable cards.  So Friday night these were torn along the perforations and assembled into train sequence order.

Saturday was Club meeting day.  So I went to the other side of town and we had the smallest ever assembly of members that I have ever seen in the current Clubrooms.  However, I got to have a good talk to PK and Greg, as well as a few others.  Today I got down to the shed in the arvo.  My first task was to reset the decoder in the 2300 loco.  Well that did not fix its whoas.  Basically, with the sound off it runs reasonable well.  However, Function 6 – the brake does not work at all.  And some sounds continue to appear from the loco even with the sound off.  With sound on, it is a very stuttered runner.  The sound ship is getting very hot.  I think the one I got back from Rocket is an absolute dud.  I think I will drop him a line next week, and see if it can be fixed up at the May show in Brisbane.  I will be working with Arthur on the Structure Building Stand.

By the way, I just clicked over 400,000 hits yesterday.  I am also about 2 posts short of 600 posts.