Plastered!

Well I finally got around to making up two more tunnel mouths for the tunnels to be installed either side of my Nammoona Ballast Siding. For those that don't know Nammoona was also a place to load cattle on the north coast. I actually have absolutely no room at all to install the relevant infrastructure and scenery for this location, but we will see what we can do. Maybe some of the infrastructure will be just painted onto the backdrop. My plan is that the timetable will have both ballast and stock trains at Nammoona Ballast Siding as conditional movements - but not at the same time.

Nammoona Loop which has been infiltrated by a Grain Train

These are my two tunnel mouth moulds with some reo already cut

The plaster has been poured, reo installed and just waiting for everything to set

The northern end of Nammoona Loop where my Tunnel portal will go

Voila!  The portal installed - just needs to be glued in.

The southern end of Nammoona Loop before the installion of the portal

The southern end of Nammoona Loop after installation - again needs to be glued in

I skipped home early on Friday as I had a electrician coming to fix a light switch in the daughter's bedroom, and while he was there, I got him to install a light above the wheelie bins down the side of the house. This will also allow the Tuesday Nighters or a running night crew to see their way down the side of the house towards the shed. With the electrician out of the way, I decided to scoot out to Austral Modelcraft and pick up a digitrax DS64 to control the 4 point motors for Rappville Loop and Rocla Sleeper Siding. I also picked up another 5 NCE plug-in 8 pin decoders for the Club Shop, as the previous ones have apparently been sold.

While at Ray's I saw a cheap overhead gantry crane that might make it's way onto the layout at Rocla Siding. We will see. I have that much call on the modelling dollar at the moment, I think I will just create a list of things to buy when I win a few dollars in Lotto.

When I got home, I went digging and found out that I had 3 more working peco point motors for installation - that was a relief.  I needed about 15m of wire to connect up these point motors back to the DS64.

The DS64 fixed to the baseboard

I also needed another 20m of wire to connect up the two new control panels back to my NCE Mini Panel.  But my soldering iron is kaput (Hey Darren!) so I needed to buy another one of these on Saturday morning so I could solder up the wire. I'm not looking forward to installing the point motors at Rocla and Rappville, as I will have to rip up track and cut out parts of the base board.  Today I installed the point motor at the southern end of Rappville Loop - it was a very hot and sweaty job.  That leaves the Rocla Siding to do next week.

The simple panel for Rappville Loop.  No pictures drawn yet but simple to work out.

The Panel for Rocla Siding - just visible at the bottom of the picture.

Both panels have an on/off switch to isolate them from the Mini Panel inputs.  So to get what I have already installed operational I just need to give my DS64 an address as well as give addresses to the 4 point motors as well.  I then need to add the 4 Normal and 4 Reverse commands to the Mini Panel.