Club Meeting and Work at Home

Saturday this weekend started with a trip to the other side of town to the Club Meeting.  While I left early, after visiting Austral ModelCraft for some decoders and Horizon Hobbies for a Data Sheet and some Kappler's Scale Timber, I eventually made it to the Clubrooms about 2 hours later and then it was lunch time.  We normally have a great time down the Club.  We have everything a Man Cave needs - the comforts of fridges stocked with softdrinks, pies, sausage rolls and iceblocks in the freezer, tea/coffee on all day, a microwave, and the reason for the Club - layouts, tools, newsletters from Club's all over Australia, and various Australian and Overseas magazine subscriptions for reading by members and a huge library.  And best of all HO'ers that stir the N scalers and vice versa along with some great modellers.

This day I was going to run a train on the Club HO layout.  I don't normally do this, but on this day I did.  I took 3 x 44 Class Locos each with a sound decoder installed, along with 8 Auscision KLY's and NLKY's, 2 coil wagons I built with 6 of my jumbo coils on them, 2 OnTrack x HLV's, 3 x AR Kits GLX, a well wagon with a 48' container, and a three pack well wagon with three 40' containers.  This was just longer than most of the loops on the layout.  Luckily I was the only person running.  They ran well enough, but I need to add some additional weight under the steel coil wagons. 

After our formal Club meeting, and our obligatory raffle (I never win - but that B...... PK did again), I ran a small presentation on building Telegraph Poles.  My making telegraph poles for Cassino just happened to coincide with articles in Model Railroad Craftsman and Model Railroader.  I also showed these articles off and examples of my scratchbuilt poles, as well as a few I had put together from an Ian Lindsay Crossarm kit with some code 40 rail.  Interest was good, as a few members wanted to install some telegraph poles on their home layouts so I think a bulk order of telegraph pole crossarms from Ian Lindsay is on the go.  Over the years we used to have a presentation of some relevant topic after each Club Meeting, but that lapsed over time.  We used to always have at least, one, sometimes more presentations, and I used to try and do a factsheet in relation to each presentation.  These factsheets then went into our Club's Workshop Manual which were then distributed to members via email or hardcopy.  New members of our Club got a CD with a copy of all our previous factsheet.  When printed out it came to over 300 pages.  I think I lost interest in doing factsheets about 8 years ago when my oldest was born.  It would be good if someone in the Club started this organising up again, but there are not many willing workers interested in this type of stuff.  Those that do the work are well and truely doing their fair share in the jobs that they currently do get involved in.

Today I went to the shed just before lunch to cut up the two extended baseboards for Kyogle and splice them into the existing baseboard.  I went to screw in some bits of ply to help attach the new baseboard to and the drill was dead.  So it was put on charge, while I completed the cutting of the new baseboards and backboards, attached the backboards by hand and had a spot of lunch.  After lunch the drill was charged and everything went together well.  I also cut off a few pieces of timber from the inside of one my access hatches, between Kyogle and Border Loop just to make it easier for me to get into.

Kyogle, with a container train in the loop, the beginning of the platform in place and a few buildings behind the road

Another view, this time with a photo of Kyogle platform and the Google Maps print out of the area across the Upper Richmond River and the road behind the station

This afternoon, I got out my G5 Data Sheet that I picked up yesterday from Horizon Hobbies.  I did some scaling of dimensions and needed some 1.75mm and 2.33mm 'I' beams to simulate the NSW Gantry Crane I was going to make.  Peter Boorman makes a very nice white metal and brass HO model but at $132 is well outside my budget.  I think for $5 worth of styrene I will make one.  I also have some nice scale chain and a few other bits and pieces in my scrap box to help me complete my model.  However, Bugger! - a quick check revealed only 1.5mm (0.060") 'I' beams in the shed.  I did have some 2.5mm 'H' beam but it did not look right.  So I rang Mewes and Son, purveyors of all things narrow gauge and the largest collection of styrene on the southside and open 24 x 7 and just up the road to boot.  Dave had been over early this morning to borrow a saw so he could do some more work on plastering the 'A' frames in his shed ceiling.  Dave advised that Raymond had a packet of 0.080" or 2mm 'I' beam, so I went round and borrowed 2 lengths off him.  Just enough to make the structure.  I will start on the structure tonight and hopefully have it complete by tomorrow night just in time to take it around to the Tuesday Nighters get together at David and Raymond's.

If I have more time available tomorrow in between kicking the soccer ball with my son, I will fine tune some of the polystyrene around the Upper Richmond River Bridge opening at Kyogle.

The opening for the Upper Richmond River at Kyogle with a few photos beneath sourced from the Internet - photographers unknown.  Below that on the lower level is Lismore Station