Making QR Wagons

On Thursday I finally sat down and set out my modelling projects.  The family decided to go shopping so I sat at the kitchen table and studied the various plans of various QR wagons that Arthur previously provided.  First up, I decided to make two PCFC wagons.  These will carry a single 20’ container each.  The next wagon was a PCL, also a single slotter container wagon.  This wagon has a large open frame in the middle of the wagon.  But if you put a container on this wagon, you won’t see that I did not include the slot.  I just made it out of single piece of styrene.  Shhhh!  Don’t tell Arthur.  Next was a HWA wagon.  This version was a steel rib sided wagon.  I only got to building the box without ribs and bogie bolster and then I pulled up stumps and decided to do some timetable planning.  It was not until today that I got back to the rids on this wagon.  These were made out of strip styrene.  I’m quite happy with how the wagon turned out.

On Friday while out shopping at Big W, my son saw that they had a clearance of plug in headsets.  They were $5 each.  They only had two on display, so I grabbed them very quickly.  I then went to their service counter and asked if they had any others out the back.  The guy came back and said yep, how many do you want?  He said they had about 30.  I said I’ll take 10.  So hopefully these will replace and supplement my existing headsets.  The existing ones are losing the foam around the earpieces.  These old ones, leave black headset stuff on the ears of those wearing them.  As yet I haven’t checked to determine if they come with an inbuilt volume control like the old ones had, but hopefully they do.  

On Thursday I also spent some time working on the narrow gauge timetable.  The one thing I worked out is that with my ever expanding QR menagerie of wagons, I need to record what wagons I have so I can work out where they can be stored and where they can go to.  I think I have the minimum number of locos required for the QR timetable, but I could get some more, and then run some double headers.

While looking at the timetable I think I have found four spaces in the timetable that I can add four narrow gauge trains to.  In each of the spaces, I can either add an up or down train.  So I could have a timetable A and B options, where some days the train can travel from Fisherman Islands to Acacia Ridge Yard in the first instance and back again later, or it could run in the opposite direction.  Later on in the next 2 spaces, the same can occur.  I could use one of the pairs of slots for another coal train, but with only 4 wagons in my first train, I can build that up quite a lot before I need to add another complete train.  I have made some changes to the timetable cards.  As I now can run around all the trains in Acacia Ridge Yard, instead of having dead end sidings, I can add the run around instructions.  I can then remove two shunt trains from within Acacia Ridge Yard that repositions the locos from the previous dead end sidings to the other end of the coal and grain trains.

So there will be more activity here over the next week or so.