Back in the Driver’s Seat

So after rediscovering my enthusiasm, I have just sceniced the area north of Richmond River on the layout, as well as installing the roadway on the western side of Barker Street. The scenicing reached just short of Simpsons Parade on the West side of the track. On the East side the scenicing has gone all the way to the end of the platform to reach the underpass at North Street.

Richmond River is at the bottom of this photo and left side is west of the track and the right side is east of the tracks.  The track is heading to Cassino station.

 

This photo shows Barker Street in the centre foreground.  The white pieces of paper are to mark the locations of various houses that are yet to be built.

This photo focus on the area closer to left of Simpsons Parade.  This shows the current extent of scenicing to the west of the railway line.

Another view around Simpsons Parade.  The small area to the right of the road was where I did my demonstration for Lefty and Son.

This view shows the east side of the station all the way up to North Street has been sceniced.

An alternate view showing Barker Street on both sides of the railway line and the white pieces of paper where houses will be built.  The unstained balsa on the far side of the track is the recently installed section of Barker Street.

 

Between the Richmond River and Barker Street I plan to install a small swamp area.  This will eventually contain water and various reeds and swampy like scenery.

Closer towards Cassino, a small drain takes water from one side of the tracks to the other and into a small ditch is also being installed.  This logically drains to the river.

 

The plan is to complete the scenery around Cassino on the west side of the layout from just south of Simpsons Parade to the extent of current plastering next weekend. Following that I plan to make the track runable again. That means clearing up the masking tape and paper towels and cleaning the tracks.

 

I stated this scenery work on Thursday arvo and did some more on Friday arvo and concluded what has so far been done today. This morning I sent out an invitation to Lefty and Son as well as Shelton to see if they wanted to come over today at about 1:30pm as I was planning to be doing some more scenicing. I thought they may have been interested in seeing how I do it. However, Shelton was busy, but Lefty and Son turned up soon after 1:30pm. So I did a section of track in front of Lefty and Son’s eyes and Lefty took some mental notes.

 

We also discussed Lefty’s benchwork for his central peninsular and his main scenic drawcard upon entry into the train room. However, I will leave it to him to talk about this on his blog.

 

Yesterday was Club meeting day so I travelled over to the far side of Brisbane in pouring rain. The guys working on the new HO clubroom layout have done some very nice work on the layout baseboard and have started suggesting ways to attach the top deck to the frame. 

 

Yesterday I also picked up a packet of 5 x 4 Function only decoders. This week I plan to start to install 4 of these into the terminal cars of 2 Eureka HUB sets. With these installed, two decoders can be set up as a consist with the first in the front car and second in the rear car. So when the consist is going forward, the rear red lights can be lit. When it is going in reverse, the front red lights can be lit. We can also use other functions to control the carriage lights, also the 3rd red light on the rear of each terminal car. Apparently I think I read somewhere either in AMRM or on the Aus_Model_Rail yahoo group that this light has an alternate purpose and was controlled independently of the normal rear lights.

 

I plan to pull one car apart tomorrow and see if we can fit the decoder and wire it up as planned.