Tuesday this week we were off to Geoff’s for our fortnightly get together. He had
Splitter’s Swamp set up and powered up. I must say that the front of the layout is
looking particularly good, especially when the model lights are all turned on. Geoff has a light inside and outside the station shed, inside the goods shed as well as on a pole in the yard. They
are very nice indeed when lit.
On Wednesday I received my packets of On Track Banana wagons in the mail.
Today I took them down to the shed and I replace a few older AR kits wagons in
my banana train with the On Track models version. I then took some of those
replaced wagons that I took from the banana train and swapped one of those with a wagon
from the fruit train and another in the pick up goods. The excess wagons are now
sitting in Park Road Siding ready to be disposed of or swapped with some 4 letter
code wagons. All the ones I replaced today are 3 letter code wagons.
During the week I also updated the timetable for the next running session
and moved that troublesome ballast train out of the way of the pickup goods. I
adjusted the timetable graph, updated the two trains in question Nos. 36B and 38B
and then adjusted the sequence numbers on a lot of other trains between when
this ballast train is now run and when it did run. The sequence number is provided to
allow me to sort the individual timetable cards in order from first train to
last train very quickly.
On Friday a few of us set off down to Darren’s for a run. We got to see
the finished product of the main station area and yard on Darren’s layout and
then what will be a staging area to hold his trains. Everything ran well and
looked good. While Darren’s layout looks like it is built to the flat earth
policy, it definitely is not. There are just very subtle changes in scenery
contours and it look very much like the outback NSW countryside with its
basically flat terrain but there are slight hills there. Everyone grabbed a
throttle and jumped on the layout running trains. We even had Arthur (our
latest invitee to the Tuesday Nighters Team) running trains in DCC. His home layout
is dual gauge DC. Darren’s layout will be certainly very interesting to
operate once he is to that stage. He is very close now, he just needs to name all the locations and sidings and create some trains.
Yesterday was Club Meeting day so I went to the Train Club. While there I installed a decoder for
one of the members in a pommy diesel. It had a really weird springy pickups which were
not conducting too well. However it was running, but it only had two wheel
pickup so beggars can’t be choosers. I also brought another pommy diesel home
and installed a decoder in it today. It was pretty difficult and I had to do
some magic to isolate the wheels from the motor at one end. I also had to check
out someone’s DL class where the front headlight and associated marker lights
(white front and red rear) were not working. When running in reverse the loco
is fine – except the headlight bulb lights up but nothing is shown out the
headlight in the loco. Anyone got a wiring diagram for the Austrains DL class loco?
So after spending some time on the DL and moving a few banana wagons around
today, I started looking at my 73 Class again. This was the first one I wired
up, but I somehow stuffed the front light board. So I took it apart and decided
to try and wired it as per the description in the June AMRM and the Youtube
video post that was on one of my blog comments a few weeks back. Bad move! Those damn surface
mount LED’s are so small. My soldering iron is not that small. I might have to
buy a special one during the week, so I can work with the surface mount
components. As I was trying to turn around the front white marker lights on the
light board, I unsoldered the red ones. I actually ended up losing both red
LED’s when they went ‘Ping’ out of my tweezers while I was trying to put them back on the light board. Luckily I have a few spare red
surface mounts LED’s in my collection. So I replaced them. I successfully
turned around the first white LED, and unfortunately, the second white one
wanted to visit its red brothers and also went ‘Ping’. I eventually found one
red surface mount LED, but I am now down one white LED. I don’t have any spare white surface mount LED's.
I will put the call out to my modelling mates to see if they have any spare ones. I might get this finished next weekend if I'm lucky.
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