Another Slow Week

Tuesday this week, I had a full house at my place for our fortnightly Tuesday Nighter's Meeting.  I think we had 12 visitors attend.  They entered the shed and had a bit of a look around.  Apparently a guy called Bob, has appeared on my layout.  He seems to be lacking any form of clothing.  I'm not sure if he was related to the person who placed him on the layout.  The model, complete with a beer gut, happens to be standing outside Ron and Marg’s B&B.  The layout is so vast, that I wonder what else the guys might have left behind, that will take me quite some time to find.  During the evening, Arthur scored the last of my model entries in my AP entry for Master Builder – Structures certification.  While the attendees were wandering around the shed, Geoff said to me, was that I needed some track diagrams in Clapham Yard and Fisherman Islands Yard to indicate what point throw actuator does what.  So I worked on that during the rest of the week and now have a bit of a diagram, that eventually I will place on the layout fascia in a couple of places to assist the crews working those yards.  One of the issues is that these locations are very high off the ground, and you really need to stand on one of the small steps I have located around the layout.

On Thursday Darren and Geoff came to my place, and I drove them via Brendan’s place and then to went to Toowoomba and back.  We ventured up there to say farewell to our modelling mate Barry (Baz/Bazza) Freeman.  I have known Bazza since the mid 90s.  We caught up with a few other modelling mates and quite a few members of the Toowoomba Model Railway Club of which Bazza was a member.  Three of our modelling mates, Bill, Brent and Doug all spoke at Bazza's funeral of our shared attendances and experiences at many Modelling the Railways of NSW Conventions, and Armidale Conventions.  These guys speeches brought tears to our eyes.  Tears of laughter.  Gee we had fun and plenty of laughs at various trivia nights, maybe at some sort of watering holes or two, and at dinner somewhere.  We will miss ya Bazza!

Saturday this week was the local NMRA Div 1 meeting day at Glen’s place.  On the way to the meeting, I stopped off at Aurora Trains and picked up a modern police car, that George was keeping for me.  It was a large turnout at Glen’s place, with about 40 member there.  It was a great day of presentations, information sharing and watching trains run around Glen’s NSW based layout.  I sold a couple of items that someone was after from my detail item collection production line. 

While at the meeting, young Arthur asked me to sign something, and it appears he is endorsing another AP for Master Builder – Scenery certification.  I gave some paperwork to Arthur on Tuesday night for him to consider and advise if there was anything else I needed to put together for the information pack to support my AP application for that category.  I guess he thought that I did not need anything else.  I have also started looking at the Model Railway Engineer – Civil and Model Railway Engineer – Electrical certifications.  I think these will take me at least 6 to 12 months to get everything together and then I will consider moving onto Master Builder – Prototype Modeller and Chief Dispatcher certifications.  But that is potentially the year after’s work.

Last night I received a phone call from one of Tuesday Nighter’s crew.  Peter advised us that his lovely wife had passed away following her battle with the dreaded C.  We offer our deepest sympathy to Peter and sincerely wish him all the best and hope he resumes our fortnightly get togethers when he is ready, as he always has some wise words and explanations for us all at these gatherings.  So it has been a bit of a sad week.

Today I eventually got down to the shed sometime after 4:00pm.  I actually ran a number of locos around in Clapham Yard and Acacia Ridge Yard.  That is the first time in quite some time.  I ran both standard gauge and narrow gauge trains.  But it appears that I have now lost power in Acacia Ridge Yard for the 12 mm area.  So next Friday – a public holiday in Brisbane, I will go down to the shed and trace back and resolve this power issue.  I’m certain it is just a wire coming off some feeder, that I might have knocked while doing some other task on the layout.  But I did have a method in my madness today.  I was testing the track in a couple of places, as these pieces of track will be the ones that I will submit for my Model Railway Engineer – Civil certification.