Club Buy and Sell

have done very little this weekend and it continues a slightly lean period of shed activity.  I was at home sick on Friday and did not get to the shed.  I did however spend some time updating the timetable cards of the narrow gauge trains with additional text to assist the driver and North Coast Control.  Basically this was comments like “await line clear” by Train No. ...   I did discover a couple of trains where the timetable advise one to depart 5 minutes before the section was scheduled to be clear by another train.  So I have now fixed these issues up.  So this week I will be making changes to the Excel spreadsheet and printing a final copy for December’s running day.  Our scheduled Cricket match on Saturday morning was cancelled due to ground conditions so that put back 5 hours into the day but no shed time.  The arvo was spent at a Halloween Party with a family from my son’s school and quite a few other school families.  We went to the Manly Halloween Parade and had a good time.

Today was the Club’s Buy and Sell.  So back over to the other side of town.  There was a good number of sellers and a constant stream of buyers through the doors.  I sold three old Lima locos that ran very well and picked up an Australian National 80’ louvre van for a bargain and two sets of points to replace two in Grafton Yard.  The new ones were curve points replacing two normal large radius ones.  The curve points will better fit the track geometry in the single ended track sidings in Grafton Yard.  Quite a good day over all even though I did not sell too much.  There were lots of NSW bargains there.  Quite a lot of AR kits RO?X wagons.  However, they were too modern for me.  It they were NO?X I would have picked a few up.  They were about $20 – $25 each.  There were also lots of three slot container wagons for also around $25 with containers.  I could have picked them all up.  They were absolute steals.  But I held firm.  I was trying to offload my excess wagons, not add to the congestion on the layout.

Upon returning home later this arvo after struggling for about an hour, I was able to replace a Peco point spring in a dual gauge point located in Clapham Yard.  I found a point spring lying around in the bottom of one of my storage drawers.  Not being too clever, I did not think to cannibalise a few cheap points from the buy and sell to get a few more Peco point springs.  There is always next year in May when we have our next Buy and Sell.

Maybe next week I will get around to the installation of the LED lights above Border Loop and Clapham Yard.