Well Monday this week was my travel day. It started with bunking out of our hotel room and storing our baggage. Then a bus trip to Central, then tram trip to Lillydale. I had never been there. We then caught the same tram back to Central. This was followed by a Metro trip from central to Martin Place for lunch and saying good-bye to our son. My wife almosy had kittens when she jumped onto the escalator at Central for the metro. It must be about 40m long. We then walked back to our hotel, picked up our luggage, and then took a bus back to Central. The XPT soon arrived and we boarded our sleeper. You get a welcome package on boarding and a complementary light breakfast in the morning. The trip was good. However, we lost about 30 minutes near Wyee and the train manager over the PA system said there was a signal fault. Our tardiness blew out to about 37 minutes, and hovered around there. It would come in to less then 30 minutes, and then creep out to 40 minutes and then then we got into Roma Street about 30 minutes late. I think I woke up for every station that we stopped at throughout the night. At Roma Street, we decided to catch a train to Altandi and then a bus home from there. As we were training it through the southside, the XPT was due to be heading outbound at that same time. However, we did not see it, as it might have been delayed by the cleaning duties and then finding a new path through the southside on the dual gauge. The first bus outbound of the morning is not until after 7:00am in the morning, which is pretty poor. Late in the arvo on Monday while travelling north on the XPT, I saw the candy XPT speed past on its way south. It was most likely the train from Grafton.
On Wednesday I started doing some modelling. I was adding 5mm of foam to some of my model modules. I then tried to terra form the foam to incorporate the various levels of track and scenery. I now have to adjust the locking mechanism on each of the model modules to the previous module for the modules with the foam above the baseboard. More work needs to be done on this feature.
On Thursday I hit the kitchen and family room floor trying to confirm the track layout that i will use at the rear of the modules, where the dual gauge splits into standard gauge tracks and the narrow gauge tracks. I have one version of the trackwork, but I think I might investigate other versions of this over the coming weeks. I will transcribe the trackwork onto my paper copies of the track work that will fit on the Model modules.
Saturday was a trip to Paul’s place to continue the work on the NMRA Div 1 FreeMo modules. I had created a set of steps with railings for one of the houses on a module. The kit we used did not have any back stairs. After placing then and confirming that fitted in pretty well, I asked Clinton to paint it up and we then glued it to the module. I had also previously assembled and painted up some ladders to be used around some houses on the modules. I spent some time adding various people, animals, and other detail items, like cars, seats and BBQs. I had made some lines for the clotheslines out of phosphor bronze wire. Alisha had made some clothes to be added to the lines on the clotheslines. There are now plenty of funny little scenes on the FreeMo modules and I dreamt up a number of 3D printed detail items that could be created to add to these scenes in the future. If my man gets around to 3D printing these detail items, then I think he will sell quite a few of them. At the end of the day we gave the 8 corner modules a coat of black paint on the fascias and boy, didn’t that bring the focus from the module in general to just the top of the module. It was like turning on a spotlight on the top of the module.
There are a couple of items that have to be added to my next building list to be added to scenes on the FreeMo modules at the next working be session.
Today I went to Jaycar and purchased a couple of RJ45 sockets to allow me to break out the wires from the RJ45 plug that gets put into the socket. I plan to create a sample connection to the first 4 signals on the new exhibition layout as a demo for later in the year. I just have to check if I wired the signal on my signalman’s control panel as common anode or common cathode, so I can build my signals for the layout the same way. Maybe I needed to write that done somewhere when I first put the control panel together.
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