The Week's Activities in Review

Tuesday this week, we ventured over to Arthur’s place for our regular meeting.  On his layout, he had his new oil tankers running circuits on the QR track.  They look very nice.  Arthur, does some very nice modelling work.  The rest of the night is then spent sitting around his tables in his garage chewing the fat.  It was a very good meeting.

On Wednesday while the various ANZAC day marches and dawn services where on TV,  I went down to the shed, turned on the TV, and started to investigate if I could make quite a few more water stand pipes for placing in various crossing loops on the layout out of pieces of styrene.  Well I did cut up various sizes of styrene tube and cleaned them up.  I will need to work out how to effectively bend the various tubes if this project is to be any sort of success.  May be I might have to use some brass sections, and see if I can bend these a bit easier.

Yesterday quite a lot of Tuesday night crew went down to Darren’s place, as he put on a Tuesday Nighter’s BBQ lunch.  Darren lives very close to Whoop Whoop, well not that close, but at least you can see Whoop Whoop from there.  He makes the trip up to our places in suberbia every second Tuesday night, and this was his thanks for opening our houses to him.  Well I was picked up by Shelton who already had Cliff in the car, and David who also drove to my place, and we all travelled together.  So we car pooled to Darren’s, and were met there by Greg, Arthur and Peter, and were soon joined by Geoff, PK, Grover and Brendan. 

The work that Darren has done on the layouts if fantastic.  The whole area around the Ballast Siding has been redone.  It now has a small run around siding, and it has incorporated a building that Geoff was getting rid of.  It has one less siding at the ballast loading end and a ‘headshunt’ siding has been installed at the other end, to service Geoff's building.  The scenery work that Darren has undertaken around this area is great.  Darren has also purchased maybe a couple of hundred trees, and these are starting to spring up in clumps around the layout and look fantastic.  I think I can see a bulk order for the same types of trees coming in June on my layout.

During the day, quite a few trains where run from end to end on the layout by various drivers.  We always knew when Shelton was running a train, as occasionally the layout would go silent, as he ran into a wrongly arranged set of points.  At least PK said it was Shelton.  Darren arranged a great BBQ for us, so we were well fed.

I can’t wait until Darren has his next Operating Session.

When I got home, David and I went down to my shed. for a few minutes.  Following the visit to Darren’s, and seeing a couple of vary large termite mounds at his place, or up his street, and also seeing quite a few the previous Sunday when out on the 620/720 railmotor on the trip to and from Casino, I decided to try and make a couple on termite mounds.  So out came some plaster, some yellow ochre and voila.  Quite a few (maybe over a hundred) small termite mounds were created and allowed to dry.  Hopefully when I next get down to the shed, I will be able to use a couple of dozen mounds around the layout and maybe quite a few more, might be destined to some mates layouts.