Another Weekend Lost

This weekend I was summoned to a Operations Session at Wattle Flat on the Saturday and was there with Garry (my driver – I was his second person), Brendan and Geoff, and Jack (his first ops session) paired with the owner Darren.  It was also Garry’s first Ops Session at Darren’s.  Garry is a US outline modeller and not a NSW modeller.  But he did really well.  He is also a Digitrax DCC man and had not used NCE before today.  You can teach an old dog new tricks.

The session was great.  Each crew ran 4 trains each.  An initial out and back and then after a short mid-session sustenance break, we ran another two trains again an out and a back.  Our first train was a mixed.  It required a huge amount of shunting at its destination, placing all the cars at their intended locations, and then picking up all the wagons heading back the other way.  This return train just gets left in the yard, and put away by Darren.

After the break, we were put on the ballast.  This comes off the main into the yard, where we have to share with the location with a crew doing shunting.  We need to move the guards van from one end to the other, as we need to review and head down the branch.  We take the staff and our train which consists of a load of empty ballast wagons, and a plough and a few more wagons to the ballast siding half way in the staff section.  These 6 empty ballast wagons are placed in the siding, while 6 full wagons are pulled from the loader and added to our train.  We then continue to the staff section location and have to place two empty WSC sleeper wagons and a MLE with loads of rail on it, into the perway siding.  We have to pick up two loaded sleeper wagons and an empty MLE.  There is also another sleeper wagon in the siding, that needs to be moved and put back when we are finished.  We then need to put the guards van back on the rear and head back to the junction station on the main line.  Here we need to end for end the guards van again, and this time for good measure we also put the ballast plough on the end as well.  We then proceeded back on the mainline towards Dubbo.

A great about 2 and a half hours operating, not counting lunch and our sustenance break.

Today I went out with the boss and picked up a couple of cartons of beer and used my son’s discount card.  That was $5 that was better in my pocket than the liquor place.  Upon returning home and having lunch, a mate from work came over with two of his very cute grandchildren.  They came to see the layout.  They had a great time.  They ran a train around, picked out some of the scenes, like a clown climbing an a bridge, a Yowie, a motor bike crash, lots of other animals and various flashing lighting effects.  Dave’s main reason for visiting was to drop of some of his father’s memorabilia that he wanted to get rid of.  It included a steam pressure gauge, some old engine driver oil cans, a few framed prints, lots of train DVDs, many books, and some old metal signs.  He used to be Curator at the Redback museum before he retired.

I will find somewhere in the shed to display these items. 

So because of these activities, I did not progress any work on my Arduino program rewrite for Shelton the Photographer.  Hopefully next week.