The Week in Review

With the New Year's Holiday on the monday of early this week, I decided to attack that pesky tunnel and the off centre track at one of the Running Creek Tunnel locations. I got a bit of stick from a few people about that tunnel.  Well it was not such a hard job to fix. That carriage from the photo in last weeks update now goes through quite easily, as do a number of other wide and high wagons like the XPT coaches.

I then decided to put the five trays of trains that I took to the Club the previous Wednesday back onto the layout. I have no idea if they went back to where they came from but near enough is good enough. What I did not do yet is fix the coupler heights on the two 48's. They were maybe just fractionally high, so I'm thinking the train that the 48's were towing at the Club last Wednesday week (not my train) also had low couplers and that contributed to the mismatch issue.

So I think I will replace the centre mounted shanks with underset shanks to adjust the coupler just that little bit more. What I did also do on Monday was adjust the starting voltage CV2 on about 10 locos so that they now start moving on speed step 1. Once I get the hang of Decoder Pro I will do a more in depth job by adjusting the pulse strength frequency to see if I can get them to move off at a slower rate.

Saturday was Club Meeting day. So I made a trip over to the other side of town via Austral Modelcraft to pick up a few NCE decoders for the Club shop.  A few trains were circulating on the layouts.  While out the back of the Clubrooms the construction crew were cutting up steel to make security grills over our large windows in the Shed extension.  When I left, one grill was welded up, and the second was being tacked together.  The steel had been cut for the third grill and the burrs were being ground off.  Still more steel needs to be cut up, and I think they are short one length to make the last 5 bars on the last grill.  I gave a small helping hand by holding the steel lengths as they was been cut off for the second and third grills.  The inside crew on the previous Wednesday had started to affix sheets of ply to the walls of the shed.  Conversations has now turned to what colour to paint the walls, and it seems that the winner is Blue - like a background sky colour.

Today I floated down stream to the shed and tried to get DecoderPro working on my netbook via my newly acquired USB to Serial converter from Jaycar as recommended by Marcus Ammann's website.  No such luck.  I cannot get the drivers to install correctly to enable the converter to be picked up on a USB port.  So I will take it work tomorrow and let a guru look into it for me.

Tuesday this coming week is Tuesday Nighters at Peter's Place. If my memory serves me correctly, Peter was doing some rework around his port area, so this will indeed be very interesting to see. We will also see what everyone got off Santa.

Wednesday is also pay day, so that means that I can pay off more of my debt to the Boss, before I re-borrow again (and a larger amount) to pay off my Austrains 81 Class, some Steel Coil wagons, and whatever eventually gets announced in the next few weeks by the other manufacturers. Add to that some Eureka Oil Pots, some Austrains PMX steel wagons and a couple of 73's! I'll also need an RSH or two for my loco sidings. There is also supposed to be some cattle wagons from Eureka around mid year. I need to win Lotto!  We also need to see that promised newsletter hit the Blog!  It just can't be that hard to update the Blog each week.  If I could I'd offer to help him, but being in another state it might be a bit hard.
I must also work out how to sell stuff on ebay as I have two complete 7 coach Lima XPT trains (plus some extra coaches) to divest myself of. That might allow me to put a deposit on one Auscision XPT! Anyone want some old Lima coaches?