Happy Bathurst Day

I spent the day today glued to the TV in the hope the Team Tricky Dicky was to win the 2019 Bathurst 1000 race.  They certainly did and they could have taken it a bit easier on my nerves.  The result was in doubt until the last corner.  Well done Scott!  While the TV was going, throughout the day I did move from the chair to the kitchen table and back again, to do a couple of bits of modelling.  I put together about 36 x 44 gallon drums and cleaned up the flash from next 30 drums but not the lids as yet - maybe later tonight.  The other task that I did was fold up and then tie up about 26 tarpaulins of various colours.  The tarps went into the container where I have maybe 150 tarps already assembled.  You can never have too much detail around the layout when you finally install it.

Later in the day, I decided to rescue 4 x QR narrow gauge grain wagons that I tarped quite some time ago, and bring them up to the kitchen so I could do some more work on them.  The work was to apply some tie down ropes to these home made tarps.  The tarps because they were painted with a thick coat of spray paint are quite course and they tend to want to return to a flat shape and not follow the wagons sides.  They bow away from the side of the wagons.  That is not a good look for a scale model.  So I attached some cotton to the insides of the tarps with super glue and then when this had dried, I pulled those ropes tight and super glued those ropes to the underside of the wagon.  The result was much better than before I had those ropes attached.  They now look quite presentable.  The issue is now that I cannot run those wagons empty.  Well I could not really do that before either as the three scratch built wagons that I made had a styrene frame inside the wagon that held the tarp in the shape of the wire frame that existed on the prototypes wagons that I have modelled.

Yesterday was Club meeting day so I went to the Club to catch up with everyone.  I handed over two 2400 class locos to Greg as he bought them under my original order.  They ran quite well and I think he is impressed with the sound of his new models.

Yesterday afternoon was a birthday party for my niece which I attended on the way home, so I never got home from the Club until about 9:00pm.  So basically no modelling work yesterday and no shed time.  So I still have to attach the droppers to the Fisherman Islands Yard around the narrow gauge trackage that was upgraded with the various crossover from a couple of months back now.  The next job after that will be to colour code the point actuators (push-pull rods) so operators can work out what rod connects to what set of points in this yard.  So both of these tasks will hopefully occur next weekend.

The biggest job I have to do, which I keep deferring and thus in turn defers my next operations session, is to desk check the narrow gauge part of the timetable to ensure that the narrow gauge wagons start at the correct sidings and the trains pick up the correct wagons and return them to their starting location at the end of the timetable.  Maybe this will be revisited in the next couple of weeks.