The Week Prior

Last Saturday was our NMRA meeting down the Gold Coast.  So the three of us who travelled down to Casino for our train trip got up early in the morning and went via the Bakery in Casino and hit the road north.  We were looking like arriving way too early.  So we went via Tweed Heads, and filled up with some cheap petrol.  Then over to Maccas for a coffee and Mcmuffin.  Then a quick detour across the road to the conveniences, as we had been travelling for a couple of hours.  Then back onto the road to Labrador.  However, the traffic was hideous.  We got there about 50 minutes after we had planned.  We missed half the first presentation.  At least I got to listen to the second presentation from a mate and then the third presentation was by Barnacle Bob himself, talking about Mosquito Creek.  This is an absolutely brilliant layout.  Hopefully it will be open for viewing at the 2025 NMRA Convention in Brisbane.  If you have the opportunity, please check it out.

The centre peninsular of Mosquito Crteek.  Mosquito Creek is to the right of the light house right the way along the peninsular.

The right hand peninsular.

Our host for last Saturday also had a brilliant layout.  It is very simple, but the modelling on display was second to none.

A nice waterway behind some houses

Fresh fruit and vegetables being sold out the front of the house.

A view of the town.

This week I had to attend work for 4 days.  So I did not get around to anything model railway related.  Now while the Olympics on TV, I will sit around and watch the idiot box and watch all the events.  This morning I was picked up by Shelton and we went to a local Buy and Sell.  It seemed well attended in terms of both sellers and purchasers.  There was some bargains there.  I saw about 20 or so NMRA members and about 3 or 4 from RMCQ and a few other friends, so I had a good time having a chat.

Today I did my first trial fit of the Cassino Station Refreshment Rooms.  I think I know the width that this building is going to be.  I will complete the mock up this week.

Cassino Station Building Planning and a Trip for Good Measure

Late last week I was planning my modelling activities for this week.  I was going to be reviewing the dimensions of a future model of the Cassino Station building.  I was provided copies of plans a while back and I thought I had everything ready to rumble.  However, while reviewing the plans last week, I realised that the distance between the left hand Station Building and the right hand Refreshment Rooms, and their Breezeway in between did not look right.  So on Monday I double checked the Station building plans and everything was scaled to HO size correctly.  When I looked at the Refreshment Room plans, I realised that these were drawn to a different scale compared to the station building.  Never assume!  That was the reason that my scaling of the Breezeway between the two buildings was incorrect.  It was supposed to be a hairs breadth under 105mm in HO scale.  My original figure was 66mm wide.  I could hear those alarm bells.  Now when I adjust the Refreshment Rooms to be at the correct scale, the breezeway works out almost exact.  Problem solved.

So on Tuesday morning after mowing the grass, and before visiting Barnacle Bob (whom was entertaining Clinton and Peter), I was able to visit Office Works and get the plan of the Refreshment Rooms scaled up by 345% to print the plan in HO scale.  So maybe 340 might have been good enough, but it is close enough.  So when I got home, I traced the outline of the Station Building and Refreshment Rooms and took that down to the shed and overlaid that onto the platform at Cassino.  Whoops!  Basically my selective compression has made the station platform just a tad short.  The Station Building with its roof overhang needs to start at a particular place on the platform as the platform takes time to widen out to fit everything.  The Refreshment Rooms roof is also slightly wide for the rest of the platform.

So I think I need to do a couple of things.  I might reduce the width of the Station Building roof by about 5mm on each side.  I think the Refreshment Rooms are enormously wide.  In my first attempt, I will potentially reduce the width down to three/quarters of the actual width.  I will also reduce the roof at this part by 5mm on each side.  The station length is long enough to take the full length building.  But I will need to do a scale mock up out of 1mm styrene for the building before I make any more decisions.

So on Wednesday I put together the scale mockup of the model of the Casino Station building.  I have yet to reduce the roof line by the 5mm on each side.  But I have affixed the roof to the square temporary rectangular base.  I also started building the Cassino Refreshments room model.  The base and the roof are currently the full width.  I have the platform side joined to the base.  I also have added some styrene placers on the base, so I can fit the rear wall 25mm in from its actual position, without glueing it in.  The rear wall just slots into the placers.  By adding more of these styrene placers to the base at other locations, the rear wall can be positioned at other locations to produce a narrower Refreshments room model.  This will help me work out how wide this building will be.

On Friday morning PK picked up Barnacle Bob and we all went down to Casino to catch the LVR 620/720 railmotor from Casino to Glenapp Loop and back in the afternoon.  I was going to measure up some things in Casino on Friday before my trip on the Lachlan Valley Railmotor.  On our way down through Tamrookum, we saw some railway workers with a high rail vehicle on a bridge just north of the Tamrookum Loop.  I immediately thought that there might be a broken rail at that location.  As we travelled a few hundred meters further south, we saw two NR class locos and a freight train sitting in the Tamrookum Loop waiting to come north.  They were not scheduled to be there, so I knew something was up.  We continued to Kyogle where we wanted to photograph one of the morning trips from Casino to Kyogle Loop of the Railmotor.  While there I took the opportunity to take a few measurements of things on the platform at Kyogle.  It also appeared that the northbound railmotor was running late.  We heard an announcement at Kyogle that the south bound XPT was due in 45 minutes.  It should have been through a couple of hours earlier, so it looked like it had been caught up in ‘our assumed’ broken rail incident.  In a few minutes a northbound Aurizon freight carrying mostly sailboat fuel (air) went north.  I thought that the XPT would cross it at either Kyogle Loop or Loadstone Loop if there wasn’t a train in Loadstone.  We were then met at Kyogle platform by a husband waiting for his wife to arrive on the southbound XPT from Brisbane.  He had been advised by her that there was a broken rail causing a track signalling issue, delaying their train.  That confirmed exactly what we had surmised.

We then decided to head to Casino as we would get a better photo there.  As we went south, we saw the railmotor in the distance heading north.  It was trying to make Kyogle Loop.  I thought it would have time to terminate and reverse and head back to Nammoona Loop to allow the southbound XPT to overtake.  So when we got to Casino, we did what any normal person would do, and started to measure up many of the buildings, to compare them to the plans that I have.  We measured the width of the Station building.  The width of the Breezeway.  The width of the Refreshments Roof building and then took lots of photos.  At Casino, we waited and waited and about 4 hours and 10 minutes late the XPT arrived.  Boy were those people going to get in late to Sydney.  Thinking that the railmotor might only be 6 minutes out we waited for the railmotor.  But it was about a half hour late when it eventually returned to Casino and left north again.

Refreshments Room building from the Breezeway

I didn't know that there was a cut off on the corner of the Refreshment Room building.

The roof work under the Breezeway

XPT Arrived at Casino

XPT Finally on its way south

Morning tour people disembarking

Afternoon tour people getting on the railmotor

The first return trip to Glenapp Loop then left immediately, but it was about 1 hour and 30 minutes late.  We hadn’t checked into our Caravan Park cabin for the night so while we were offered to run early on this trip, by the very helpful LVR crew, we waited for our trip.  We went and got something to eat and then checked in and returned to the station.  The earlier trip returned and we jumped on.  It had made up a few minutes.  Only 5 people were in our compartment, there were more in the other half of our trailer car.  It was a good trip, but being so late, we missed seeing most of the sights heading north as it was just too dark.  Heading south it was completely black, even though the moon was out.  Given our lateness, we thought that there was going to be as issue at Casino station.  The night time XPT was in at Casino getting there at 18:40pm and remains there until 19:30pm (before departing south) while we were also due in there at the same time, due to our lateness.  Thankfully a smart Network Controller allowed our train to enter the end of the platform at Casino while the XPT was also there. We arrived at 19:15pm.   What a great day!  Football, Beer and Pizza followed, but in reverse order.

Travelling over Fawcett's Creek at Kyogle and I only now noticed that there is a water supply pipe across the creek.

Disembarking from the Railmotor while the XPT is also in the platform.

Toowoomba Trip

So on Tuesday I finally rigged my Arduino test platform with some LEDs and downloaded my Kyogle code to the Arduino sitting on my work desk.  The LEDs on the test rig, worked, so I was very happy.  So I then took that Arduino to the shed and plugged it in.  The first 6 LEDs connected all fired up correctly.  Two were on the southern end of the Kyogle platform, a third was for the platform that flickered, one for a fettler’s shed just off the platform and two for the Signal box.  One is inside and one is outside the signalbox.

I then started looking at how I was going to wire up the Kyogle station building.  On Thursday I started soldering the various wires to what will be the fascia mounted switches and spliced in the connections to the above board LEDs to the station building and to the plugs that allow the station building to be removed from the switches via these plugs.  I drilled two holes in the baseboard to allow the wires between the plugs to be fed through.

Sometimes I really hate the wine enameled wire on the pre-wired 0402 LEDs, as I just cannot get the wires tinned, to allow them to join to other wires with solder.  They just keep disconnecting from the soldered connections.  Anyhow perseverance solved that issue.  I installed the various LEDs in the station building, and down through the floor of the building.  One for the open waiting room, and two for under the platform awning at each end of the building.  I attached the plugs (that will feed through the baseboard to the Arduino) to the LEDs on the station building.  I then took the station building to the layout and fed the wires through the holes in the baseboard.  I then connected these to the Arduino wiring and below layout plugs and turned everything on.  Amazingly, it all worked. 

Saturday I went to the Bayside Model Railway Exhibition and was quite surprised by the collection of layouts, and the quantity of public attending.  I spent close to two hours there talking to various people and inspecting the layouts.  I then high-tailed it to the Club for our monthly meeting.  I was also very concerned about the raffle drawing.  Whenever we buy  multiple tickets in the raffle, we are given tickets in each book on the go.  Usually five different coloured books.  Usually well over 100 tickets are sold each month.  First prize went to orange D18.  Second prize went to orange D17.  Third prize went to orange D20.  I went off like a frog in a blender.  My ticket was orange D19.  It was rigged!  It had to be!  Everyone present roared with laughter when I loudly and verbally reacted to every prize being around my orange ticket.  These tickets were drawn by three different people.  All other coloured books missed out.  I could not believe my luck or lack of it.

Today I was picked up by Geoff who already had Darren in the car, and we then made our way to Brendan’s place and then up to Toowoomba.  We visited Bill and his Tenterfield layout, which now has almost all of his track down, just a couple of passing siding or industry sidings still to be completed.  We ran trains for a couple of hours.  Very enjoyable.  We also imparted our $0.02 of wisdom and then had a very delicious lunch.  This was followed by a cross town trip to Ben’s place and an inspection of his layout in his shed.  Darren had been there before, but for the rest of us, it was our first viewing.  We also got to do a few shake down trips around the layout.  A bloody brilliant day, spent with friends and doing some operations on two layouts. 

My time next week will be taken up revisiting the measurements needed to make the Cassino station building and refreshment rooms and the interconnecting breezeway.  I had scale plans by something is nor working with one of my measurements.  I’m actually heading down to Casino next Friday with PK and Barnacle Bob for a trip from Casino to Glenapp and return on Friday.  From there we will spend the night and then travel to the NMRA meeting on the Gold Coast on the Saturday.  Another action packed weekend of Railway related activities coming up next weekend.

South Brisbane Interstate Station

Sometimes when I get to look back on the week just completed, I forget what I have been up to.  On Monday and Tuesday I had to work, but when I was home I was reading one of the Australian Railway History magazines that I scored on Sunday last week from Mark.  The one in particular that I read had an article about South Brisbane Interstate Station with some diagrams.  As I have that location on my layout, I was very keen to see what was written about it.  It was nice to hear what sorts of trains made their way to South Brisbane.  The article also said that there were many light engine movements, to and from Yeerongpilly Loco.  In particular, the article said that a 73 class loco was sent from South Brisbane late at night to Yeerongpilly Loco to refuel.  A couple of hours later it ran back to South Brisbane Interstate early in the morning.  I base a 73 class loco at South Brisbane Interstate as a shunt engine.  Looking at my layout operations timetable, I did not have these two light engine movements included.  So a quick glance shows that I can fit these two movements in.  So I did.  They may have been about 30 minutes later than real life but I now have two move trains in the timetable.  While there were a few goods trains coming and going to South Brisbane Interstate, my timetable had them at different times, but similar trains.  That was good enough for my modeller’s license version of the timetable.  The train that left newspaper wagons at Park Road, actually went all the way to South Brisbane.  I had that train terminating at Park Road Sidings.  Again that is good enough for me.

The most significant arrival and departure from South Brisbane each day is the Brisbane Limited Express.  That train was always in my timetable.  My arrival time, may be up to 20 minutes later than historically timetabled, but departure time is spot on.  Most of the goings-on that occurred at South Brisbane Interstate has been sort of replicated in the timetable.  While I shunt trains from the platform to the various sidings in the yard, I do not have a lot of tracks to play with as I leave some spare wagons sitting in some of the outer tracks of South Brisbane Interstate.  So I did look at consolidating some of those spare wagons to Acacia Ridge Yard, to allow me more flexibility with the tracks available to use at South Brisbane.  I will consider that in the future.

On Saturday morning I did consolidate some wagons in track 8 at South Brisbane Interstate.  So track 7 is now available.  I did find one VR wagon in track 8 had some very dodgy wheels.  The tyres where off the tread and the wheels were under gauge.  So a little bit of super glue was applied and an NMRA standard gauge was used and everything seems back to be working when I pushed the wagon through some trackwork.  The wagon does need couplers so I will get around to that.  Speaking of couplers, the last Tuesday Nighter’s meeting was held at Geoff’s place.  As he is one of the main protagonists of KD coupler dropping on my layout, I thought I would strike early and strike often myself.  So two KD’s may have found there way onto his layout.  He found them and sent me the photos.

I did spend some more time on Saturday afternoon on my Armidale Presentation.  It is pretty close to completed.  However, I did think of something early Sunday morning when I woke up, but I have since forgotten what I was pondering.  I might have to sleep on it again to see if I can remember what it was.  At the time I thought it was a good example to include in my Presentation.  That part I do remember but that was it.