I went for a walk later than usual on Monday and on the way out I saw a metal contraption on the footpath outside a neighbour's house. It is kerbside cleanup this week in out suburb. On the way home, I thought I would give it a closer check out. I thought it was some sort of cage, but it was one of those kitchen tidy things, with 7 slide out caged trays. I already have two smaller ones in the shed. One is used by operating crew to put their gear in when they attend - jumpers, keys, throttles boxes, etc. Well I grabbed it and carried it about 150m home. It was in the shed later in the morning and permanently positioned in the early afternoon. I found a place just next to the others. Although this one is quite a bit higher that the others, I was able to fit it in.
I went for another walk on Tuesday morning, and blow me down, I came across a house in the other direction that had two of these kitchen tidy things fitted with 4 trays. So I continued my walk, but cut it short in case someone had the same idea as me, or the guys were coming that day to throw everything in the back of the garbage truck. But I got there first and then took these two kitchen tidy things and carried them home about 180m and placed them in the shed. Again they have a place and are also ready for use.
On Tuesday morning, I braced under the layout under Cassino Loco with an additional leg. I then carried in a 8’ x 10" sleeper and laid it between my ladder at Cassino (where the branch to Old Cassino comes off) to some wood laid across the 4 tracks at the northern end of Cassino Yard. I then got up on top and started working on the point at Dutton Park on the top deck. Before removing the old point, I decided to realign the old point motor and gave it a test. It was working. I added the Peco accessory switch to the top of the point motor and it world not work again. So I removed the accessory switch and I thought that I would look at alternate methods of controlling the light above the point to advise crew which way the point is set. While up there the narrow gauge point was checked and it was working well. Again while I was atop the mountain, I added quite a few track tacks to the narrow gauge and standard gauge track to assist with re-alignment. I then ran two locos – a standard gauge one and a narrow gauge one through the points in both directions on both routes and they seem to be running quite well. So at this stage, I thought I got out of this dilemma quite easy.
Wednesday I had a brainwave about the accessory switch. I connected up a second point motor just with an accessory switch to the same point controller outputs. My plan was to fire the push buttons and change the point as well as the indicator lights above the layout. This was working. So on Thursday I changed tack and wanted to make permanent the test I did on the previous day. I jumpered the new point motor back to the original point motor and then when tested, both point motors would not throw together. When they had separate wires from the point controller, they worked. This must be an issue with voltage drop through the wire and the higher power requirements at the end of the wire run. I did some test runs around the rest of the layout. This is doing my head in. So I removed the jumpered wires and then the point motor at Dutton Park would not throw. I adjusted the location of the point motor ever so slightly and eventually got the point motor working again. So I think the end result will be either I add a new DCC snap point motor controller (e.g. QSNAP) to throw the point motor that just changes the LED indicator, or acquire a Switch8 and control the LED lights directly from that.
I put this all down to a bad joke and then proceeded to run my track cleaning train from Grafton Loco to Clapham Yard. It also did a deviation from Cassino through to Lismore on the Murwillumbah Branch. It ran through all the tracks at these locations.
Friday’s preparation included testing all the consists and single locos that were listed in the timetable cards for the first 40 trains. I also had to clean the North Coast Controller’s desk. A rather big job given what was stashed on it. I have discovered some low voltage sections in Grafton Yard. Some tracks are showing lower voltage than other tracks. This has me perplexed. I also found a track with no power in Loco Pilly. When I came up from the shed, the heavens opened for about an hour. Apparently some people got really bad hail.
NMRA meeting day was Saturday and I went down to Sparkles house for most of the meeting, before I had to leave early to attend a 40th Birthday party for a nephew. But we did have a couple of great presentations while I was at the meeting.
My place was the last place on an "Ops till you drop" weekend. Two people from Melbourne, Mark and LLoyd attended a layout on Friday night, two on Saturday and were here today. My layout session was also attended by a few of the regular crew, some who were there on Friday and Saturday. Well there were some issues. I think my power supply is on the way out. It is putting out low voltage and it is affecting my Ops Sessions. We had a couple of sections of track with now power. We had a loco playing up. We also had a couple of derailments. But people enjoyed themselves, and we put Geoff into North Coast Control, and 3 hours and he did a sterling job at his first attempt. But the headsets worked until a wire came off back at the source, and a whole string of plug in points went down. I think someone bumped into the connection. We completed 24 trains, and a couple were almost home. We did run pretty well on time, although some trains were early and some were about an hour late.
This week I will fix all the issues identified and everything will be ready for an Ops Session just prior to the NMRA Convention in August.
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