The XPT is Awakened

This week I could not get motivated to do any modelling activities.  Maybe the heat had something to do with it?  Saturday would have been too hot to live in the shed during the day.  Finally today I went to the shed.  I got out some paint and painted the coupler release levers on both ends two of my kit built QGA wagons.  Last week I added these working coupler release levers.

After that I decided to work on my Auscision XPT.  I get enough ribbing about my XPT not running (Hey Clinton!) that I thought I might give it some attention.  This train derails all over my layout.  I had originally thought that this was because the two power cars were not evenly matched for speed.  So today I put them back to back and ran them back and forth over about 10 feet of track on my layout.  I adjusted the Reverse Trim setting on the two power cars.  One was significantly faster than the other in one direction and the other in the opposite direction.  So I adjusted the Reverse Trim setting CV95 on both power cars through a process of trial and error and in the end, after only about 5 minutes both power cars were pretty evenly matched for speed in both directions.  I then took the 7 car XPT set for a run from Grafton Yard to Cassino and back a couple of times.  No issues on that section of track. 

After lunch I continued testing the XPT with a run from Cassino to South Brisbane Interstate.  There were some sections where one of the power cars would just stop running.  I think this is a pickup or wiring issue inside the power cars.  I will pull them apart one afternoon next week and inspect and clean the pickups.  However, after adjusting the Reverse Trim setting, they ran pretty well, with an occasional derailment of a bogie of a coach when one power car lost power.

On the way back from South Brisbane Interstate to Grafton Yard, the working was much better than ever before.  Not perfect, not acceptable, but almost tolerable.  Occasionally one wheel on one bogie would pop off and this was re-railed and the run resumed. 

I will give the train another run next weekend after some maintenance.  I still have a couple of KD couplers between two XPT coaches having the occasional issue.  I found that about 4 couplers were missing their KD springs.  So I added springs to these.  We will see how it runs next week.

Hopefully I will start on adding some brake gear to two of my scratch built wagons during the week.  These are some of the 8 wagons I need for the Master Builder of Cars AP certificate.

I expect soon that the registration for the NMRA Australian Convention will be available, so we can register for that event.