Quiet Weekend

Saturday of this weekend was not spent doing anything in the shed except put a number of new wagons on the track. Earlier I went round to Mike Boyde's House and helped him with his NCE Powercab DCC System. He had just put a new set of hand made points in and we fired up the Powercab - short. Me thinks it was the point. Yep we found two places were there was just a few threads of copper and rail still bridging where there should have been cuts. We fixed these but intermittently we had more shorts, so we disconnect the point altogether. So Mike is now operational with a DCC loco which I had installed a decoder into on the previous weekend. He was happy as a pig in .... - maybe we won't go there.

Many years ago Mike and I used to scratch build lots of wagons out of styrene. Mike was an expert in making MLE's and their many variants. Over the years I have acquired quite a few of these creations from sales off other friends as they rationalised their collections. Mike also scratch built many ballast wagons, ballast ploughs, concentrate wagons, 4 wheel coal wagons, BMT's, Nepean Milk wagons and many more. Mike used to ask me to proof read his instructions and I would make a wagon ot two along the way. Mike was my inspiration for getting into scratch building so many of my own wagons out of styrene, with just AR kits bogies and KD's being purchased. Mike Boyde is certainly a Master Wagon Builder and along with the inimitable Jim Hutchinson who is certainly the greatest house and structure builder i've seen, and knowing that I cannot attain their standards in their particular fields, although I dabble in both, I concentrate on the unusual, creating unique detail items like rocking ducks, picnic tables and picnic sheds, pallets, industrial bins, above ground pools, dunnies, and various sheds.

So on Saturday Mike offered me some of his scratchbuilt NSW wagons as he has moved to On16.5 scale. I was so humbled. They are absolutely rippers and in reality when you look at them you start wondering what brand of model kit or ready to run model are these? These scratchbuilt models will grace my layout with pride and will no doubt do many miles of running during future operating sessions.

I always remember one running night maybe 10 years ago on a Friday at the LDMRC clubrooms at Springwood. Mike was backing a string of bogie milk tankers into a siding at Brisbane Street Station - the terminus on the Club layout when we hear this noise and we all look over and Mike had about 6 BMT's in the dirt and they were at all different angles. I yelled out - "It's no use crying over spilt milk Mike" - and everyone around cracked up - two others from our Tuesday nighters group were also in attendance on that day - Darren Lee and Geoff Burns. That night's events still makes me laugh when I think about it. I expect that the pleasure will be repaid to me if the BMT's ever come off the rails in a future running session in the shed.

Today I spent an hour or two in the shed and did a bit more scenicing from Beaudesert Road Level crossing through Glenapp Loop to the beginning of The Risk Loop.