Doing Some Planning

So this week I was talking online to various people on Tuesday and Wednesday evenings.  On Friday, being a Public Holiday in Brisbane I did some shed time.  Basically my job over the long weekend was to identify why I had a power issue at Acacia Ridge Yard.  Well no sooner had I got down to the shed, turned power on, and I saw a loco in Clapham Yard (same power district as Acacia Ridge Yard) and this loco was derailed across a set of points and I thought this might be the cause.  Well I re-railed the loco and I then started running trains through Acacia Ridge Yard again.  Everything worked, but I never had any indication that there was an actual short in the area, as opposed to a wire off and no power.  However I will go back and revisit this investigation when time permits.  But all is working now.

I have never had a paper plan of the track layout of my top deck like I have for my other two decks.  So I thought that I would spend some time creating one.  I thought I would create a grid made from thin strips of paper stuck end to end and placed 30 cm apart on top of the baseboard.  The track locations from each grid could then easily be transferred to a paper plan made out of an A3 sheet of paper.  So I did this for Clapham Yard and included Loco Pilly.  I then started doing the same 30 cm grid from paper strips for Rocklea Sidings and transferred this to the same sheet of paper as well.  So I now have an A3 sheet of paper with the basic layout of the track from Rocklea Sidings through to Clapham Yard and Loco Pilly and heading towards Dutton Park.  There was a method in my madness in doing this.  I needed to create a scale track plan for my paperwork required to submit my Model Railroad Engineer – Civil and Model Railroad Engineer – Electrical certificates.  So after a weekend of writing documentation and drawing various diagrams, I am very close to having a good enough first draft of both documents to show off to our local Divisional accessor on Tuesday night this week.  I am then hoping to get some feedback as to what I have not done, what I have not understood correctly and what else I need to do to satisfactorily complete these pieces of documentation for official assessment.  Activities will now turn to doing better and neater diagrams of all the required information that I need to present.

So as part of the Civil requirements, I need to present three pieces of track that I have scratchbuilt and demonstrate successful operation of powered locos through these pieces of track.  So some of the various pieces of track that I have scratch built are in slightly difficult positions to observe their operation up close.  So I have chosen pieces of track that are more accessible for observing.  So my submissions might be slightly more complex than most, as I am presenting dual gauge pieces of track.  So I need to be able to run standard gauge (HO) and narrow gauge (HOn3½) locomotives through the pieces of track, in both directions and through the different routes in the case of a set of points.  Well I spent some time on Saturday doing these run through tests and adjusting the track on either side of these pieces of track.  So the result was that these three pieces of track were working pretty well.  Some pieces of rollingstock run through very smoothly, while one item of track causes a bit of a rock and roll through the narrow gauge route, but they all work.  I tried running slow, and running fast so I am confident they will work well.  Everything works better when you have power going through the various parts of the layout you want to show off!

Today I was obtaining information to add to my track plan, which was the DCC address of each of the point motors, and trying to find another document that I had in my hand a few weeks ago, but I placed it aside for safe keeping.  The issue is, it is too safe, and now I cannot find it.  While doing my DCC point motor address investigations today, I found one wire had some loose from a point motor, so that was fixed.  I then found out that a narrow gauge cross over in Clapham Yard does not seem to be working at all.  I can’t even find where the Digitrax DS64 is, which is controlling this crossover.  Another task for another day.