44s Dominate

So a slightly slower week this week with me being back to work.  I wonder when I can schedule my next holiday?  On Tuesday we went to Barnacle Bob’s and we had a good turn up.  It is great just wondering around his layout.  A recent addition were a number of old buoys.  One was in the creek mouth near the wharf and lighthouse, and a few others were up on the wharf, complete with a splattering of barnacles.  Our discussions on Tuesday evening turned to the Auscision 44 class models.  I was told by the Auscision guys a couple of weeks earlier that the locos were on the water.  On Wednesday we see that there was some posts showing that pallets of 44 class locos were here.  The next day I got an email advising that I was getting a delivery sometime between last Friday and Tuesday this week.  Given my luck I put my bet on Tuesday this week.  However, on Friday while I was working from home, the boss brought a package in.  It was 3 x 44 class locos!

On Saturday morning I raced over to the Club and handed out some models.  PK got 1 x 44 class loco.  Someone else got the last NOBY wagon from our 4 pack that we got.  When I got home from the Club, it was straight down to the shed and I put my 2 x 44 class locos onto the track, one at a time.  I tested that they ran on address 3.  I tested it by blowing the horn and then ran it up the track, back and forth.  I then used 'programming on the main' and set the first loco to its cab side address.  I tested that it again by blowing the horn and gave it a run up and back down the track.  One down – one to go.  I followed the same process for the second loco and all was good. 

I now need to work out what train these two new 44 class locos will be swapped into.  Nothing stands out.  I do need to move some of the layout’s newer locos (read that as recently acquired and DCC decoder installed) around the layout.  I can count about 6 that I have added since May last year.  These are mostly sitting in sidings around the layout.  I think I need to put these in loco sidings and identify where locos can be swapped, or even an extra loco could be added to an existing train.  The only issue with this is that most of the trains are currently limited by the length of the crossing loops now on the layout.

Yesterday I also tested up an iteration of Shelton the Photographer that will run on a DC layout.  Some of our Tuesday Nighters run DC and not DCC.  I won’t call out Arthur, Bob and Peter, but if they wanted a version of Shelton which would run successfully on their layout, we have one.  With the separate camera flash for each wheel on a loco passing Shelton, or if we install an Arduino version you can get one camera flash per loco.