Ballasting all Week

With the week starting with a public holiday and ending with me on holidays, it was a great week.  I believe some other activity of quite some note also occurred nearby as well.  It might have been the Commonwealth Games!  So the TV’s in the house have been getting  a workout with me watching everything that moves.

I am just so lucky that I have a TV in the Shed.  This enabled me on Monday to do a bit of ballasting.  I laid ballast through the front accessible section of Kyogle – maybe about 2m of track in both loops.  I then added ballast to the track north of the future river and bridge at Lismore to the first tunnel north of Lismore about 60cm of track.  I also ballasted the Cassino Meatworks siding.  This was just over a metre of track.  I also did another 30-40cm of track north of the points at the meat works up to the Hotham Street level crossing to the southern end of Cassino.

On Tuesday I continued working in the same area.  I did some baseboard work for the road underbridge at the northern end of Lismore.  I then cut some foam and glued this in to place to make the cutting in this location.  Following this, I ballasted the visible track on the spiral north of Lismore heading towards Murwillumbah.  This is about 2.5 to 3m of track.  The ballast crew then went north on the main line and about a metre of track at the northern end of the Glenapp Loop towards Beaudesert Rd level crossing was also ballasted.

The next day the work crew mixed up a couple of loads of plaster and plastered the cutting and the road underbridge abutments at Lismore.  I also glued down the ballast at Lismore around the spiral towards Murwillumbah that I laid the day before.

On Thursday I painted (actually stained) the road surface with my standard ink wash, and then painted the sides of the cutting and the abutments on the road underbridge at Lismore.

While Fairy Hill Loop was the first section of track on the layout that I ballasted, the just loop sat there incomplete ever since.  So the ballasting crew started ballasting about 10 cm south of the loop to where the ballasting in the loop started, and then added about another 50 to 60 cm of ballast at the other end of the loop.  I still have about 30cm of track in the loop to complete before I head further north to Kyogle, but I ran out of that colour of ballast.

Attention then tuned to Lismore Yard.  The section of track between the two cross over points to the yard behind the platform was then covered with ballast.  But again I then ran out of that colour ballast.  So I am now out of all usable ballast at home.  A few weeks ago I had 4 Kg and I thought that I had more than enough to complete the layout/.  I guess that the layout is just a bit bigger than I thought.

As the sections of track were ballasted and allowed to dry and set, the following day I checked them all out and with almost everyone I followed up with another drizzling of my diluted glue mixture.  All are now rock hard and are looking quite good.

On Saturday I just went round and cleaned the track with a track rubber at all the locations that I was spreading ballast and glue.  This should make the track usable when I get around to running my next train.

Today I decided to break out a couple of bottles of previously made up scenery paint I had sitting around on the layout and covered a couple of small sections of white plaster into a brownish undercoat.  Again a small amount of further progress.

So over the last week, I have laid another couple of Kg of ballast around the layout.  The issue is I am again out of ballast.  I will have to wait until the May Exhibition on Brisbane to get my hands on some more ballast.  And judging by the past work, it looks like that I will need another 2 Kg of ballast alone to complete Cassino North Yard, 1 Kg for Old Cassino Station and Yard, about 1.5 Kg for Kyogle Yard and the track south towards Fairy Hill Loop, another 0.5 Kg to finish off Lismore Yard, probably 0.25 Kg for a section of track between Old Cassino and Lismore, and then I have all of Murwillumbah Yard to complete.  That will take over 2 Kg of ballast as well.  I had also forgotten about Rappville Loop, and I’m sure that is well over 1 Kg of ballast required there as well.  I bet that I will not be paying the same for this next shipment of ballast that I did for the last.  The last lot I got was $5 per kilo at a Buy and Sell!

Also back on Monday I completed my first draft for the Modelling the Railways of NSW Convention presentation in May.  I also got to switching out the batteries in my Fleischmann Dynamometer car.  So that is now operational again.  So I might give it a run this week to just re-measure some sections on the layout.

It looks like that my NCE order is still weeks away from arriving.  So that has stuffed my next week of holidays.  I’m sure I’ll find some things to do, like watching the TV for the next week of Commonwealth Games activities and I’m sure I can spend some time in the shed.