Another Wagon and More Loads

So this week I went for a scout around the model railway shops for the first time in a while.  I visited Aurora and picked up a 10 packet of Wheelie Bins.  I also dropped off some flyers for our show at Simon’s.  After visiting Simon’s I went a few doors down and visited Jaycar and picked up the components that I needed for the last incinerator I was making.  So that was Saturday all wrapped up.

Sunday I assembled the 6^th power supply for my incinerators, and put together an additional power supply for the next project.  I then decided to complete the ribbing on a scratch built QR HWA wagon.  I then added the under floor truss rods.  Once that was complete, I sent the wagon to the spray booth.  So that was given a once over of light grey and is now sitting on the track in Acacia Ridge Yard awaiting a load.  I decided to give another of my HWAs a bit of a touch up paint job.  There was some sections of white on the underside of the sides that could be visible when operating the wagon, particularly when looking up from underneath.  So I cleaned this issue up.  

Now back in the mood for doing some styrene work, I decided to build two loads for some other QR open wagons.  These would be steel loads similar to what Arthur had previously built.  They would consist of an ‘I’ beam base and some steel rod lengths on the other end of the wagon.  So the ‘I’ beams were painted silver and then weathered with a distant dusting of mission brown.  I still might add some light brown colour over this in the future.  I then cut up the steel rod lengths and built them on top of some scale 4” x 4” (0.040” x 0.040”) styrene to represent dunnage.  In the future I will not glue to the rod to the dunnage until I have painted each separate colours.  I sprayed the rod and the dunnage silver and then picked out the ends of the rod in red and then tried to pick up the dunnage in a wood colour.  I then painted a lot of other dunnage lengths the same wood colour that were already glued to the large ‘I’ Beams on the base of the wagon.  My plan is to pick up some styrene next Saturday on the way to the Club and build up a few more loads (3 or 4) of steel for some more wagons next Sunday.

I also went back to Jaycar today to investigate method of showing what trains are in my hidden sections of track.  I could use a doorbell camera, a reversing camera, or some cheap IP wifi cameras that can broadcast to a tablet that could be used by North Coast Control, or just on a tablet fixed above the layout.  I will keep looking.  What I really need is one of those cheap security systems that you used to see in some stores where there was 4 black and white camera outputs displayed on a screen.  My issue is budget.  I won't be able to spend much money on this.  But I can’t find these old camera systems on ebay.