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.

Ops Session Wrap

On Monday I sat at the kitchen table and set about installed LED’s into Kyogle Signal box and then connecting the wires up to a plug.  The plug was then wired out the other side, to the Arduino, and the other side via a switch, which was later cut into the layout fascia so these lights can be turned on or off separately.  Later, while I was cutting a hole in the baseboard underneath the signal box, I realised that a small fettler’s shed next to the Kyogle Platform, which I had picked up at a Buy and Sell, had lights installed inside.  So I also ran wires from that shed to the Arduino and I tested them and they are working as well.

On Tuesday I had Anatol visit and drop off some 12mm track that he purchased and I repurchased off him.  It contained about 6 sets of 12mm points, so it was a bargain.  Tuesday evening was Tuesday Nighters.  Eight (8) of us got together of Geoff’s place.  We can only have a get together at his place during school holidays as his wee small kids would be disrupted in their bedtime routines during school days.  I purchased a QR destination board from Darren that used to be fitted to the QR Diesel hauled passenger trains around the suburban network.  It works, and it has internal lighting.  I will have to ask some questions as to how it is wired, and what voltage is required.

Wednesday being the day before I went back to work, was not occupied by much modelling related activities.  Although I did glue the fence posts onto the Kyogle platform and did some maintenance to one of the under platform support structures.  A total of all of 5-10 minutes work.  I also did clean up the kitchen table a bit and put a few things away in storage bins.

Saturday this week I did nothing.  The day was interrupted by the boss wanting to through our existing lounge out at the upcoming council cleanup, and then go looking for a new one.  So we spent a few hours trawling through the shops.  I am still stuffing around with the lights for Kyogle platform.

Today I had the pleasure of heading over to Anthony’s Ops Session.  These are great days.  There was 7 of us there.  I was SAR#1.  I had two easy as jobs running from Kybybolite to Tatiara Down with a freight, and then with the Overland passenger from Tatiara Downs back to Kybybolite again.  There was also shunting the freight at Tatiara Down.  The third train was a freight from Kybybolite to Tatiara Down, with some wagons dropped off and more added, and then to Border Junction and then onto Jameston.  OMG!  My brain was stretched to the limits.  I had about 8 wagons onboard.  I had to pick up about another 8 wagons.  The wagons needed to be picked up and placed on a couple of team tracks.  Just remembering where everything was to go back to.  It took me hours.  But I finally got the freight train back off the branch and into Tatiara Down.  Dropping some wagons, and picking up a lot more.  Then I had to run back to Kybyolite and stable the train.  I still have 2 trains to run, when time was called on the session.  This was the 54^th session that Anthony has run and this one was apparently my 25^th attendance.  There are about 4 crew in front of me in terms of attendance proficiency, and of course the host has attended all 54 sessions.

 A view of Nankiva.

The headshunt end of Nankiva.

A view of a section of Kybyolite Staging.  In the distance we can see the Border Junction location.

Another view of Nankiva.

One of the Silos at Tatiara Downs.  

Some of the industries at Tatiara Downs.

More industries,

One of the teams tracks at Jameston.

I great end to a week.  Back to work for a couple of days and then back on the tools working on my Armidale presentation.

Lead up to the Gold Coast Model Railway Exhibition

Monday this week, was spent building the station ramps for access to Kyogle platform.  I am also building the various fence panels.  As the ramps began to take shape, I added the legs underneath them to support them at the correct angles.  More fence panels were made up.

On Tuesday I painted the ramps my desired colour.  Once that was dry, I added four runs of fencing to the model.  I then joined these up and then added the last lot of three fence posts and made the last run of fence rails.  So far the model looks passable.  I still need to add the first two runs of fencing to the platform.  These are just sitting on the platform not glued in yet.

I installed my Arduino to run off rectified track power, underneath Kyogle station.  I also wired up the first three LEDs at the southern end of the platform.  I tested them, and they all work.  I have written the Arduino program to control all the lights, and it compiles.  But I have not yet uploaded the program into the Arduino, or even tested the program on the workbench.

Thursday was my Anniversary so we all went to breakfast in town, and then did some shopping in the late morning.  I gave my self a day off modelling.

Friday I got everything ready to take down to the Gold Coast Model Train Exhibition at Nerang.  I thought I would spray paint 12 tea bags in various colours and have them ready to work on during Saturday.  The car got packed so I could have an early get away.  I watched the cricket on TV.

So, at the Gold Coast Exhibition on Saturday, I was doing demonstrations at the Exhibition.  I started with the tarps.  I already had a stash of painted tea bags, and first job was to cut them to HO size of a 24’ x 16’ scale tarpaulin size.  After I had cut them all to size I moved onto the folding and tying up stage.  I had a few people ask about them and I got some bystanders to fold up their own tarps and tie them up.  Next task was to cut up 10 lengths each of two difference sizes of dowel.  These were then split with a modelling knife to create a pile of fence posts.  These were then dipped into a stain mixture of ink pad ink and metho.  So that was the second job for the day.  I can’t remember what I did after that.  I think we put on a decent display for the day.

Being a glutton for punishment, I went back down to the Exhibition day for a half day, today.  I added a tap to my scratch built hand basin for the Kyogle Signal box.  I then made up the waste pipe from the hand basin.  I still have a lot of detail to add to the signal box.  I was hoping to fix my wiring for the two LEDs in the signal box, but I did not get around to that.  I will get onto that either tonight or tomorrow.  The next demonstration was to build a structure to allow two roof top whirly birds inside a large shed to turn in unison when connected to a slow rev motor.  My previous effort did not have aligned gears and the motor would not run the gears.  There was just too much friction.  So I built a new structure.  Now it is free spinning and the device spins way too fast, even with a slot rev motor.  So I have made a gear reduction drive and it is still too fast.  I can still but one more gear reduction in line.  However, I do have a tortoise motor that runs at about 3 turns per minute, maybe I will drop the drive reduction building and just use a tortoise to control the whirly birds.

We had some interesting conversations with people from Sydney, Hobart, and also some locals.  Numbers through the door certainly picked up today.

I’m back at work later this week for a few days, and then I think I’ll shout myself some more time off from mid next week.

Kyogle Activities

This week’s tasks included the following.  I stained the various split posts that I made last weekend on Monday.  I also drilled some air holes in my Jiffy box for the headset power supply.  I don’t want that to overheat.  I had been looking at making some animated whirly bird for a shed roof.  I built the first prototype and it is a bit tight to get the motor to turn things easily.  I might have to build version two next week.

Tuesday I painted a small section of platform that gets inserted between the signal box and the station building.  I also installed 12mm bogies on three 12mm wagons.  They seem to roll quite nicely.  All I need to do now is find some KD couplers and install them.

A Guards van and a weed spray van with new 12mm wheel sets.  wagons are sitting in Acacia Ridge narrow gauge yard.

The petrol bomb and the louvred van ready to roll.

I attended a funeral on Wednesday and caught up with some people.  On Thursday the Postie rocked up with my Auscision Containers.  So they were split up into mine and PK’s and mine went to the shed and found some wagons for them to be installed in.  Following their arrival, PK and I placed a further order for the unannounced cage containers.  I might have that by late next week as well.

Also it what must be great relief to many of my Tuesday Night group, the XPT got run on Thursday.  It ran from Grafton to Cassino and through to Lismore.  It then ran back and forth to Old Cassino a few times.  It appears that it has lots of low coupler tangs.  So they were all adjusted.  One short coupler was replaced by a longer next one, as the wagons bump when traversing the curves out of Old Cassino to Lismore.  I also removed most of the bogies and added some lead weights to the bogies.  The train now seems to run much better.  But I will look at it again next week with more outings on the layout.  Closer inspection also revealed that about 6 couplers were too low.  So when I replaced the KD’s in the set recently I may have forgotten to adjust the coupler heights.  This probably contributed to the suspect running particularly with all my gradients on the layout.

On Friday I installed three platform lights at Kyogle.  These sit behind the platform and hang over it.  I also made up lots of fencing for the platform sections from the signal box to the station building, and from the station building to the end of the platform.  I still need to manufacture the platform access ramp and also add some fencing to that.  Again a future job, maybe Monday.  I need to buy some more 0.020” x 0.030” styrene for the rails of my platform fences.  I have run out of that size.  However, I scavenged another length from a worksite inside the shed and it allowed me to finish the fencing for the platform.

This shot shows the three station lights if you look close enough.  The fencing on the end of the platform is just stand there by itself.  It is not yet glued down.  The fencing to the left of the signal box is glued to the platform section.

The platform fencing for the Brisbane end of the Kyogle platform.  This is just sitting on the platform.  The ramp will be built and placed there on Monday - hopefully.

The overview of the small opening that is where Kyogle is on the layout.

Today I had this idea that I could use one of my power supplied to power an Arduino.  So I wired up a power supply, that rectifies the DCC track signal and ran it through a plug which connected to an Arduino and Voila!  It powered up.  That will allow me this week to continue working on the lighting for Kyogle platform.  The Arduino will make one light flicker.  I will have to also add lights to the station building and the signal box, but as these items will be removable, I will have to install some sockets under these structures, and have some plugs in the structures, and as they are placed into position the plugs go into the sockets and we have electrical connections.  I have already done this in the Park Road Transshipment shed, and it worked well.  Lets see how we go.  I might be able to show off some lighted structures next weekend.

Saturday we ventured out to Karalee and our monthly NMRA gathering.  Just under 30 minutes each way.  I dropped off PK’s containers as we arrived at the same time.  We had a good turnout to the gathering, over 20 people and I gave two presentations.  They covered the wagons in the photos below. 

The two wagons above, are the Ballast Wagon (left) and the Ballast Plough (right) which I gave a presentation on building and detailing at Saturday's NMRA gathering.

More activities this week include preparing for doing a clinic next weekend at the Gold Coast Model train Club’s Exhibition at Nerang.  I think I’m working all Saturday on the NMRA stand.  Come and say hello if you are attending.

Club Activities

This last week, I had 3 work days before resuming my Long Service Leave duties.  On Thursday I did nothing on the modelling front.  However, on Friday I got around to putting all my AMRM magazines into plastic sleeves and then putting 12 plastic sleeves into some binders.  There are now 5 binders to a tub and 5 tubs have been relocated to the shed.  I have copies every AMRM issue ever produced.  These tubs are now in the shed under the Cassino baseboard.  This has freed up some bookshelf space in a bookshelf in the office and removed a few piles of AMRMs from the floor in the office.  I have since re-filled the book shelf with a few other books that were laying around on top of other books.

Saturday was the official opening of the RMCQ Clubrooms extensions, the Outdoor G gauge layout and the 50^th Anniversary of the Club (actually the 51^st).  I had the job of cooking the BBQ, so I missed the two G scale trains running through a paper banner on the new G scale staging sidings located under the new carport.  I did see some very nice weathered models running around on the layout.  A rather QR 12 mm trains was running around and it looked a treat.  Later on in the day, I saw a standard gauge train running round and it was every bit as good as the first narrow gauge train. Well done for Mitch for his weathering efforts.

Today I went to the shed and worked on cutting up quite a few split log fence posts.  These still need to be stained before placement around the layout.  At lunch time I went to Jaycar and picked up a small jiffy box to house the power supply components for my layout communication headsets.  I took the opportunity to move the LED in the power circuit that shows that power is on to the circuit, to the top of the jiffy box.  The jiffy box was attached to the layout fascia, power applied and everything tested good again.  However, just later today I worked out that there are no ventilation holes in the jiffy box, so if it gets hot, it might cook itself.  I think I will drill about half a dozen ventilation holes in the jiffy box tomorrow morning.

I need to change gears and focus on my November presentation for the New England Convention in Armidale.  So the plan was to do some work there this afternoon.  Buy my procrastination gene took over.  I reviewed the two power point presentations that I will be giving next weekend at the NMRA meeting.  I fixed a couple of spelling mistakes.  I then basically developed the outline of a whole new presentation for a future NMRA meeting about the NSW NOCY wagon.  It was then that I pulled out my notes and did a bit more brain storming and planning for the November presentation.  So that will be this week’s job.  More work will continue tomorrow.