Layout Tidy Up and Convention Preparation

With Monday being a public holiday, I spent most of the day in the Shed.  Most of that time was spent wiring jumpers to sections of the track and continuing the feeding of 10 wires from Clapham Yard to Acacia Ridge Yard.  These wires are for the Rocklea Sidings control panel and continue all the way back to an NCE Mini Panel underneath Loco Pilly.

The Mini Panel was coded up with the various commands to throw the particular points when the various switches on the panel were pushed, and it all works well.  I am still waiting for a Tillig LH Standard Gauge point to be brought into the country.  This piece of track is currently unavailable worldwide.  When this track segment arrives, I will then wire up a point motor to that set of points, and then also spend some time with one set of points where the point motor catches when it is thrown in one direction.  I think I have to replace the point motor base.  It only works in one direction at the moment.

The dual gauge sections of track in Clapham Yard that were added over the last weekend, had wire jumpers added around the Peco points and a few nails inserted into the track to align everything.  Both a standard gauge loco and narrow gauge loco run quite well over the new trackwork.  I also added two wire jumpers to Acacia Ridge Narrow Gauge Yard.  These two new sidings work well.  However, I have had a catastrophic failure of the rest of the dead end sidings.  I think I may have had a wire come loose under the layout.  But as yet, I have not stuck my head underneath to investigate.

This phot is of Clapham Yard.  This yard is a mixture of 16.5mm and 12mm track and includes a crossover of gauges and a section of dual gauge.

This scene shows the work done last weekend to provide a few more sidings in the narrow gauge yard at Acacia Ridge.  The 1720 is sitting on the loco siding, which will allow trains to move from the runaround sidings on the left to the deadend sidings on the right.

This photo shows the new standard gauge points between the 4th track from the left (the dual gauge) to the third track from the left.

This is Fisherman Islands Yard.  The baseboard has been extended at the rear to allow two more narrow gauge loops to be installed.  These will be short compared to the length of the sidings in the existing yard.

This weekend has been spent working on my notes for the Modelling the Railways of Queensland Convention next weekend.  These notes were started some time ago, and now they have finally been completed.  The last task was to supplement the notes with photographic examples from my layout to demonstrate my presentation.  My Powerpoint presentation was also sent off to the conference convenor yesterday although it has been basically completed for the last two weeks.   All that is left to do is to pack up my models for my presentation and have fun next weekend.  

I did find some time on Saturday to head over to Aurora Trains and picked up a three pack on SDS NPAX calcium wagons.  Two are for me and one for a mate, well it was PK.  I should be also paying for a 4 wagon set of Coal Wagons on Tuesday Night thanks to PK. The other thing that I did today was watch the Bathurst race.  Unfortunately Tricky Dickie’s team only came 3^rd.  That was at least a podium finish.

I think over the next week I will try and make another half a dozen clotheslines so I will have some available next weekend in case some of the Convention attendees are after one. 

Tuesday night this week is at Dr. Peter’s place.  It has been a while since we have been there and I understand that he has done quite a bit of work lately.  So I’m looking forward to that.