If it Could... it Did...

With this weekend having the third Saturday of the month, that meant that we had Anthony’s Operating Session in the afternoon scheduled for Saturday, but I had to provide my apology due to cricket being on and supposedly scheduled from 2:30 – 5:30pm in the arvo.  We also had cricket break-up scheduled from 4:30pm until 7:30pm.

Also on Saturday morning and into the afternoon, we had the local NMRA meeting just up the road at Arthur’s place.  Again I could not attend due to cricket. 

However, our game was scheduled for 11:15 – 2:15pm.  But early in the morning our game along with about 7 others were called off due to a wet outfields, or water on the pitch.  So I decided to take my son to the first XI game down the road as they were crowned Undefeated Premiers before the game, but this game also got abandoned at 11:00am due to a wet spot in the outfield, near slips and the bowlers run ups.  So we just went to our Spirit of Cricket Awards in the arvo and we stayed there until about 7:00pm.

Apparently the school came away with at least 6 premierships out of 12 in the interschool aggregate, but may have still finished second overall.  Damn!  My son’s team, while undefeated throughout the year, may have only finished second and may not have achieved their Premiership either.  I find that hard to believe, as they were playing the only other undefeated team on Saturday, before being washed out, so I would have thought they would have received a shared Premiership.  But official status will be advised during the week. 

So Saturday was a day of things going wrong.  Today, I had plans of doing lots of wiring for Clapham Yard.  So after a morning down pour and having some lunch, I went down to the shed and started working on the various track jumpers in Clapham Yard.  I had finished that when I applied the Multimeter to the track and I got a direct connection through both rails. Hmmm.  That can’t be correct.  So I turned on the power to the layout and power district 5 was showing a short.  Bugger!  So off came all the wires I had just connected.  Still a short!  So I move a few trains around in case some were sitting across a set of points causing a short.  No difference.  There was another wire I had soldered to my dual gauge separation track in the headshunt and of course I assumed that this piece of track could not be causing the short.  Well I was wrong.  I unwired it and Voila – the short disappeared.  So everything else was reconnected.  I then got out my trusty file and went over each PC board sleeper and ensured that each isolation file mark, was filed the whole way through the copper cladding.  I then re-checked the piece of track for continuity across the rails and everything was now good.  So I then wired it back up and everything ran well in the standard gauge yard.

I decided to run my narrow gauge loco for the first time in a very long time.  It was very reluctant to run.  It had to be pushed in a few areas, and then I discovered that again there was a whole track without a jumper.    However, it ended up being that an existing jumper had pulled away from the track when I was doing some track cleaning.  So that was reattached and then the narrow gauge yard was working well.  This included going through the dual gauge separation track and all the point work.

The next task is for Tuesday night, to pick up a large radius Y and then install it and then get some 1mm steel rod, for point actuation of the cross over points in Clapham Yard via the old fashioned push-pull method.  Then I can mark Clapham Yard off my to do list.

That will allow me to move onto creating about 10 power supplies to run off the DCC bus for various lights around the layout.

Just before I exited the shed for the day, I checked the RDH carriage that I had put the windows in last weekend and everything looked good.  So I reattached the base to the shell and re screwed it together.  The car had been added to me Brisbane Limited set currently sitting in Clapham Yard.  Next weekend will involve a run of this set over the layouts again.