I'm on Holidays!

This week was my kids last week of school at their current primary school.  They both move to new schools next year, with my daughter graduating on Monday night. So I had the week off to spend time at a number of school activities during the week.  It is a sad time as a lot of blood sweat and tears have been put in at the school at various working bees, BBQ’s and P&F Meetings.

 

In the down time between school activities, I did actually get to the shed as you would expect.  On Wednesday I spent quite a bit of time running trains.  I was also pottering around on the layout.  I soldered some jumper wires that had come adrift.  I have also found a section of track between two points in Clapham Yard that does not have a jumper installed, so I will remedy that next weekend.  I ripped up and relayed two sections of track - Cassino - Old Cassino and about a metre of Main Line track in Border Loop, as these were causing grief during running sessions.  Also as I was running trains, I had one wagon lose its bogie pin, with the train ending in grief.  So I've replaced the bogie pins on that wagon as well as two other wagons.  I had some screws available that I replaced the old AR kits bogie pin with.  I've adjusted bogies on about another 8 wagons.  This included loosening the screws and allowing further swing of the bogies against the coupler box and the wagon centre sill.  I also glued containers onto 5 container wagons that had been just placed on the wagons, but the rock and roll of the wagon movement around the layout means that the containers can move about and potentially come adrift.  That has now been fixed.

 

I replaced the wheels on one wagon – a Lima car carrier, as they were too large.  The wheels in the bogie were scraping on the wagon floor.  So the smaller diameter wheels allowed the lowering of the KD coupler height ever so slightly and made this wagon now compliant with the passenger train it was running in – The North Coast MotorRail.  During the train running I was doing, I was moving complete trains between the various staging sidings at Grafton Yard so they were located in the correct siding.  These trains ended up on the wrong tracks after the last few running session, so I had to put them right before the next session.  I did this by doing quite a bit of shunting.  I was having trouble with some wagons derailing when being pushed back through a set of points.  So upon further investigation I’ve put styrene shims on two points in Grafton Yard and that has stopped the derailments. 

 

I was also having trouble with my rail train set getting access to the siding at Kyogle.  I fixed this by just adding a spacer wagon to the train before the 8 car rail train.  I may as yet rip up the track and relay it, but that is something for a time in the future.  But now this train has no issues entering the siding.

 

On Thursday I also scored a new kitchen storage container about 600 mm square with 6 pull out wire cages.  This was excess to a friend's needs and they were going to throw it out.  It is now in the shed and sitting next to my original version with 4 double depth pull out trays.  This is for visitors to use to store their Procabs, car keys, wallets and any other things they bring, etc., when they visit for a running session.

 

On Friday night, I went around to Geoff’s place for a modelling night with a few of the Tuesday Nighters.  There was quite a lot of activity going on, except for me.  My next activity will be planning the building of the Murwillumbah Cement Silo so I was just drawing rough plan and putting dimensions on it.  I have a couple of photos and I tried to see if I could find some more on the Internet.  Well, would you believe it, one that came up - came from Geoff’s Blog site.  So Geoff and Darren have promised to send me a few photos that they have of the location, taken a few years ago, while they were attending one of the exhibitions put on at the Murwillumbah High School. 

 

This internet is a good thing!