Follow Up to the Running Session

Following the running session, I went down the to the shed on Monday Night to look at the oil pots that would not go through the Tunnel between Baker's Farm and the Rocla Sleeper Siding. Two wagons did infact go through. They were a bitumen tanker and some other american wagon that has found its way onto my layout. I looked at the other five wagons. They were Lifelike tankers from many many years ago. I removed the bogies underneath one wagons, and there was a circular lip forming the bogie bolster. I cut this off - it was all of maybe 1mm - 2mm in height. It must have been closer to 1mm. So I did both ends, replaced the bogies, put it on the track, added it to the rake of oil wagons and pushed it into the tunnel, and I couldn't believe it. The train now went three wagons into the tunnel. So I did the same to other 4 tankers and sure enough, the whole collection of oil wagons goes in through the tunnel now. I still do not believe it that with that small shaving of height, the train now goes through the tunnel.  The only issue is that these 5 newly adjusted oil pot wagons now have low KD couplers, so while they will run together, then need their coupler heights adjusted.  A couple of other wagons also had their coupling heights adjusted slightly via KD washers during the week.

I also spent some time fine tuning the timetable in particular the trains arriving at Murwillumbah.  I made sure that the timetable instructions covered where to run around their trains and what siding to put their train in.  I also fixed up a few places in the timetable, where the departure time was before the arrival time.  A slight cut and pasteing issue - I copied them to the wrong cells.

I received another 80 Class loco from a club member to fit a decoder as well as 2 LED's into. So I also did this on Saturday morning.  That loco runs well and while it is a blue 80 Class - looks really good as it is weathered.  It is making me wish I had another blue 80 Class in my roster. 

I also ditched three locos from the roster. A Powerline 81 and two 48's were replaced by an Austrains Jumbo, an Austrains 421, and a Austrains 80 class.

Also the Trainorama 44 that had issues a few weeks ago, was opened up on Monday Night and recived an inspection. The pin holding the top gear in the rear bogie had come out. The gear was just flopping between the gear train and the helical gear coming from the motor. I was able to push it back into place and the bogie wheels now rotate correctly. I tested it yesterday and it now runs quite a lot better.  It still makes quite a deal of noise so I ran it around for a few minutes to see if it ran better after a short run-in. So This loco won't be making its way back to Austrains (well the rear bogie won't be) as I sure as hell wasn't going to send it back decoder and LED and all.  I now have two spare locos for the next timetable, this 44 Class and an NR class.  The NR class doesn't really fit into the era of the running session - but lets face it - it runs better than my Lima and Powerline stuff.

On Friday I decided to submit an entry for the 2011 Narrow Gauge Convention to be held at the Ipswich Railway Workshops over Easter. I have volunteered to do a session on using Styrene to build some detail items for the layout and also run a clinic where attendees can build their own O scale dunny for $5. So I might have to get my notes together over the next few weeks and build a few details items between now and Easter to show off at the session.  Last night I started putting together an O scale dunny for my talk at the convention.  This will be the basis of the model that those attending the clinic will be putting together.

This week, Tuesday Nighters is on for the first time at Shelton's place. Saturday is Club meeting day and is the day when people present their designs for the new HO clubroom layout. I will spend some time this week doing a few more drawings.