A Great Week in Review

This week was Tuesday Nighters at Geoff’s which I was looking forward to attending. But alas I could not attend, as the week started off with an early Tuesday morning plane trip down to Newcastle with my sister to attend the funeral of my father’s youngest brother. This was not unexpected and there was no chance I or my sister were going to miss this day. We hired a car and stayed over night at a local B&B in Raymond Terrace, which was handy as well as being very nice. So on Tuesday we went over the railway line near Maitland (actually Tarro), but do you think we saw any coal trains on the way to or from the cemetery and memorial gardens at Palmdale. No – just one railcar scooting towards Newcastle. It was absolutely great to catch up with my three remaining Aunts and a handful of cousins and their families who made the trip up from Sydney, the Blue Mountains and Taree. We had not seen any of them for over 10 years – since before my daughter was born. I think I had to answer the same question about half a dozen times. Do you still have a train set? Do I have a train set? No way – I now have a Train Empire – queue evil laugh! It is amazing what people (family) remember about you. They always remembered my train set under my parents house from well over 25 years ago.

 

Friday this week while at work, I received an SOS from Old Mike saying that two of his locos had stopped running and couple I render some assistance. So I made arrangements to head over to his place on Friday evening. The first loco apparently had lost its address and I just told Mike, that it was not running on long address 916, but short address 3. So I changed it back to 916 for him and it ran up and down the track OK. One down and one to go. We put the second loco on the track and it roared off in one direction. It did not matter what the throttle was saying in terms of speed or direction. It just ran in forward. Hmmmm! I checked the decoder, which was a D13SR from NCE. It looked like someone (Read Mike) had done some resoldering of the red wire from the track pickup to the decoder, where it had fallen off. His solder had breached over to where the Diode was on the decoder causing the decoder to always get power applied to the drive circuit. I scrapped this solder back with a knife so it was not bridging the gap. I tried it on the track again and it worked on address 3. I changed this to number 9, as this was what the loco number was. Mike was as happy as a pig in sh.... As I have said before – “I love it when a plan comes together”. I’m sure someone before me had said that.

 

Quite a productive night for Mike. Two locos which had two decoders in them which he thought were stuffed were now working OK. And to make matters even better, Mike was after a sheet of Evergreen Styrene Clapboard for a future project, which I just happened to have. So we traded on that and he was happy again.

 

Today was a very good day for me. It was a Buy and Sell day at our Club – which we have twice a year - May and November. We had quite a few sellers turn up (one even from Sydney with truck loads of 12mm equipment) and again quite a steady stream of buyers. I took a whole lot of unneeded stuff from my place as well as some items from one of our former Tuesday Nighters (Gentleman Jim) whom has just downsized into a Retirement Unit from his two story house. I was able to sell a good quantity of Jim’s rollingstock, but not one magazine. I had almost two hundred AMRM’s from issue about 70 to near current for sale at exceptional prices all bound in the AMRM binders. I also had a rather large collection of Model Railroaders as well. Not one magazine sold. I don’t think anyone as much as looked at any of the binders or storage boxes.

 

I was also able to offload about $200 of rollingstock for myself, but I also dipped into my gains to purchase a left hand point that I needed in a yard which I scavenged for use in South Brisbane Interstate’s number one platform run around road, along with four 12mm Peco and Bemo points for Acacia Ridge Yard, as well as a NSW Water Tank kit. As I was sitting at my sale table, I forgot that someone was selling a large bundle of 12mm track for $30. It was not until I saw someone walking past with it, that I knew the horse had bolted – Buggar! I could have laid the complete 12mm sidings at Acacia Ridge narrow gauge Yard with that bundle, but I was too slow. I’ll have to buy new track instead.

 

Next week is our Club Meeting day at the Club.  So another trip over to the other side of town.