More Decoders and Some Running

This week I installed 6 decoders for a mate, to finish off his current order.  It started on Monday night with one install.  This was followed by two more on Tuesday night.  Thursday I thought about doing some work, but could not get motivated.  So on Friday I finished two more locos off.  A British HST and a British 0-6-0 diesel shunter.  That was the five I needed to do for David before he came over to pick them up on Saturday evening.  When he arrived he brought another loco over.  Upon checking it out, it was an easy install so I did it while he waited.  I think I'm now all decodered out for a while.  However, I did test run the loco I was doing for Geoff from the Club.  It was an 81 Class loco and none of the lights worked - Damn.  I thought I had that all down pat.  Headlights and front and rear marker lights - nothing works.  I think I will have to look at that later this week.

Saturday I picked up a couple more decoders from Austral Modelcraft for the Club Shop.  I also have a few more on order.

On Wednesday morning we had a local antenna guy move our house's TV antenna because we are getting some solar panels installed on the roof and the antenna is in the way.  So we got a new antenna installed and the old one just happened to be re-located to the shed roof.  All I need now is an LCD TV for the shed wall.  Maybe after I do my tax return, I hopefully will be able to afford one and also have permission from the financial controller to get it.  I threw my two old CRT's out in the council cleanup a couple of months back now.

Today I was able to head down the shed and have a potter around.  I was cutting up some control panels for my phone system that Brendan is fine tuning - I will need 23 of them.  It was then that my son wandered down and asked to run a train.  Why not!  So we did some shunting of the banana train and ran it from Old Cassino through to Grafton Yard.  We then took the Murwillumbah Passenger from Murwillumbah through to Cassino.  On the way I found a few things that I really need to fix up in the timetable. 

The banana train is longer than the loop at Old Cassino.  That is not an issue with it doing its shunting, but it is when something needs to pass it and it could be longer than the loop as well.  Having one overlength train is not an issue.  Having two is!  I will have to revisit the timetable to see if I can tweak it and mabe get the banana train out of the way of the passenger by a few minutes.

I was also trying to throw the points at Murwillumbah that are connected to a DS64 and a mini panel.  It seems I may not have addressed the DS64 yet.  So I did that, I gave it an address and then the 4 points off it also got their accessory addresses.  While I had worked out the coding for the Mini Panel I may not have coded that up either.  Maybe next week.  Lots of half finished jobs.  If I had a to do list - I think it would be depressingly long.

There is still a few jobs to complete on the track before I undertake the next running session.  I think there will be one in August or maybe September.  I will reset the layout back to its starting position before then, and I think, that where ever the session finishes, that is where the trains will start until the session after picks up where we left off.  I really need to have my phone system up before then, so I may need a working bee to install everything.

This week is Tuesday Nighters and Brendan hopefully will have our order for LED's and resistors available for collection.