Still Making and Planting Trees

Over the last three days I have been making more trees.  This has involved gluing various shades of green tufts (aka foliage) onto a large number of wire trees I have previous made as well as gluing more tufts onto 16 or so Woodland Scenics plastic twist-up trunks.  They all came out quite well.  I also decided to branch out (sorry about that!) and cut up some small twigs of lemon scented tea tree that I had cut off a tree out the front of my house a long time ago and plant these as bare life less leafless tree trunks.  They also come out pretty good.  Today I went out to the lemon scented tea tree at the front of house and cut off a few more twigs.  After viewing a photo in the latest AMRM magazine from the O Sscale Convention in Sydney, I decided that I might also try and make a small bush fire scene, where a tree has been struck by lightning and a small fire has ensued.  This scene is a work in progress, but just happened to fit into the purchase I made last Saturday at the Toowoomba Exhibition of the flickering fire effects electronic module. 

 

Yesterday afternoon and today I also planted quite a few trees.  Today I decided that I need quite a few more weeping willow trees.  So I went digging for my wire stash and started twisting up about 10 more weeping willow trees of various sizes.  I still have some work to do on them and of course they will need to be ‘no more gapped’ before being painted and greenised. 

 

Yesterday morning I had made arrangements to head over to my mate David’s place.  I delivered to him, three NCE mini panels that he ordered and these were given addresses.  We installed his cab bus with two NCE UTP’s and the next two mini panels.  On one of his control panel we successfully attached the 26 push button wires and the single common connection.  I then coded up the mini panel with its commands and we gave it a whirl.  It was pretty good.  One point will not throw, so David was going to replace the point motor that afternoon when I left.  A couple of points also throw in the wrong direction, so we will look at that on Tuesday night.  Either I have coded up the mini panel with a straight command when it should have been curved command or vice versa, or David has wired that point back to front.

Tuesday Night is the debut of this layout with the Tuesday Nighters.

 

Just to show you the extent of David’s Yard and the quality of the control panels, I took a couple of photos to show it off.  These control panels certainly look very nice.

The main station on the layout - Lower Hammersmith.  This panel is operated as an N-X panel - an entry exit panel.  You just press the two buttons together for entering the station and then two buttons for exiting the station and all the points magically throw and set up the routes involved.  A complete mini panel is used for this panel.  Below the panel can be seen the Digitrax DS64's for throwing the various points.

This is the panel for the main yard on the layout.  We have just completed the wiring of the right hand side - or southern end of the yard.  The panel shows what input number controls what track and also lists the various point motor addresses.

This is the southern end of the yard as depicted in the photo above.

This is the bank of Digitrax DS64 point controllers that control the points in both ends of the main yard.  The wiring is very well done.