Thanks Lefty!

Saturday I headed over to the Local Hobby Shop (Austral Modelcraft) to pick up a set of NDHF wagons in the high strip fitted with Spoil Bins. I chose those as I think the high strip is just slightly better looking than the low strip which are both completely better than the ghastly yellow version. The bins were chosen as I don’t have any. I have previously scratch built myself about 7 of the NDHF for sleeper loads and I also had a Sydney Models vesion.  I had previously purchased a few Sydney Hobbies concrete sleeper loads as well as getting some made by a mate. I had also previously scratch built my own lot of individual concrete sleepers. They turned out pretty good. I made these from 0.080” square styrene - if I remember correctly.

 

Following that I made my way to the Club and while there sat at a workbench and got the wagons out and proceeded to fit KD#5’s that the Ray from Austral Modelcraft provided for me. I fitted the first KD#5 and encountered every issue that alanmack48 from Aus_Model_Rail Yahoo group had uncovered and documented on Tuesday 8th January. You needed to remove the front lip of the base of the KD box lid. Otherwise the KD#5 would not swivel. I just put the wagons away until I got home from the Club that night to perform some surgery on them. So I shaved down the front lip and then installed the KD#5. It was too low, but I persevered with #5’s on two wagons. I did this as I found 4 underset KD#27 couplers. These were fitted to the other two wagons. These worked out pretty good for height against my height gauge.

 

While at the Club I installed two drop in decoders for members on their new Christmas present locos and I received three locos to take home to hard wire decoders into over the next couple of weeks.

 

Today I went to the shed mid afternoon when the cricket was on.  It was about 36 degrees C outside and considerable warm in the shed.  I just had the fan on, but it was tolerable.  I installed three sets of points that I purchased off Lefty (Dave) on Tuesday night. These went between Acacia Ridge tracks 1 and 2. This now makes both of these tracks bi-directional and allows trains to cross here while travelling on the main line to and from South Brisbane.  I also installed one of the two sets of points to allow travel between track 2 and track 3.  I cut a piece of track the same size as the point I'm missing so it will be easy to install the missing point when I eventually pick one up.

 

Once this was done, I added my four new NDHF wagons to my sleeper train.  I also added one of my scratch built NDHF's to that train.  So it is sitting in the Rocla Sleeper Siding ready to return to Grafton when my timetable run resumes.

 

Because Lefty brought along alot of points to our last Tuesday Nighters meeting for one of the other attendees to paw through, I picked up three sets of points off him.  This allowed me to progress some of the tasks I needed to do before my next running Session.  So thanks Lefty!