Thinking, Doing and Dreaming

This week began with me drawing circuit diagrams for my staff mechanisms.  The reason for this is that when the switches were thrown in a certain combination, there is back flow of power through the components and all the LED's Red and Green all light up.  I did not know if this was because I had wired something incorrectly, something was faulty or it could do it.  Well after tracing the circuits, it does back flow and all the LED's light up.  So I either have to have seperate battery circuits for each LED pair in each block or I throw out the mechanical switching so I don't use the poles on the back of the block switches.

So I then resurrected my truth table logic from about 25 years ago at Uni and my XOR and XNOR logic gates and worked out that with two IC's on every circuit board (1 x XOR and 1 x XNOR) with a couple of pull up resistors I can create the logic to power each block's LEDs.  Next week I will pick up a few IC's, some resistors along with some more LED's from Jaycar and try and fit these together so I can test it out while watching Bathurst next Sunday (Go Tricky Dicky's team) and whatever is also on at the Commonwealth Games - I am a TV sports nut.

This afternoon while watching the Dragons beat the Roosters I cut out a chassis from 2mm styrene for the Trainorama 44 Class shell I picked up in Sydney 2 weeks ago.  I have installed two Lima 44 class dummy bogies on it (I still need to fit a fuel tank).   This looks reasonable for a first attempt.  I will make a second one out of the two left over Lima power bogies and we will see how well it works.  If it works I may have to try and get a second 44 Class shell and my loco fleet will expand by two locos with one being a dummy.

So on Friday Auscision announced they were bringing out the NSW XPT in 5-cars sets with seperate 2-car add on sets available.  Well that now means that I will have to sell my two 7-car Lima XPT sets and two DCC'ed Lima power cars, along with about 5 dummy XPT power cars and a few extra cars and break the bank with an outlay of $2,300 for two Auscision 7-car sets.

Don't get me wrong it is not that we can't afford this, it is just that this far exceeds my allocated budget for trains and one needs to remain on the good side of the financial controller.  This one purchase is about my whole yearly spend and I had already spent that and more in the next 12-18 months with all the other sets appearing. 

I will get at least one sound fitted 81 class, a few 48's maybe 2 or 3, I do want to get 2 x 59's, 2 x 73's, as well as about 8 CSX steel wagons, some ABFX's, some Oil pots from Eureka, some RSH's, some BCW's and some milk pots.  I'm as certain as the sun will rise tomorrow, that someone else will bring out something else that I also need for my north coast based layout in the mean time and that will put more strain on my budget. 

I better put a Lotto entry in for Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday this week and hope one comes up with at least 5 numbers - no need to be greedy now.  The only issue is that our work syndicates for Tuesday and Thursday, need to be split 11 ways with the guys from work.