Buy and Sell

Tuesday Nighters this week was at Arthur’s and we had about 11 there if my memory serves me correctly.  After talking to Arthur, I came to the conclusion that I had to ballast my pieces of track that I need to scratch build to satisfy my Model Railroad Engineer Civil AP.  Damn!  I was hoping to not ballast the whole top deck of my layout.  It looks like I will have to at least ballast the areas around my three pieces of track.

I have also been progressing my paper work for the NMRA Model Railroad Engineer – Civil AP and I should complete that next weekend.  Current plan is to have it assessed in December sometime.  So yesterday I painted the rails of the three pieces of track I need to complete and get assessed.  I also painted up lots of sleepers that I will slide underneath the track of these three locations.  Next Friday I will glue the sleepers in.  I will then start ballasting these pieces of track and I will see how they turnout.  A pun - that was funny.  I'm modelling a turnout!

On Thursday afternoon my wife received a package addressed to her, and much to her disgust, it only contained quite a few 12mm bogies that I ordered.  So on Friday afternoon I spent some time removing the bogies from my recently purchased standard gauge QR grain wagons, and swapping them over to 12mm.  I am not a fan for running narrow gauge trains on HO track, unless you are running in Sn3½ scale.

On Saturday around lunchtime I went down to the shed and did a bit of shunting of these now 12 mm wagons around Acacia Ridge Yard through various points and curves in one direction and then the other.  They ran quite well.  Now my decision is to determine if I end up with two narrow gauge grain trains or one really long one with maybe 2 locos or stick with a single loco for that train.

On Sunday morning (today) I headed over to the Club for the November Buy and Sell.  Boy was there some tables sold and some people coming and going purchasing items.  I had a profitable day, until I gave most of my profits back after finding quite a number of items that would look really good around Cassino.  Some of the additions were eight push bikes, a fire engine, five 3D printed Land Rovers of varying models, a 3D printed bobcat, and a fettler’s trolley in a box of stuff for $10.  I still had a positive bank balance at the end of the day.  Today I had many chats with people at the Buy and Sell.  I caught up with people I have not seen for a while and generally had a good time.  I understand that the sausage sizzle sold lots of snags and drinks as well.  One piece of sadness was that the other week, we must have had a lightening strike near the Club - most probably on the Telstra tower next to our grounds.  The guys inside the shed at that time apparently had kittens.  But no one went into the Trailer shed until yesterday.  Boy did they know something was wrong.  The freezer got zapped and all the snags for the Buy and Sell were on the honk big time.  So they had to buy some more snags yesterday for today's BBQ.  Hopefully we can get a new freezer on our insurance and maybe some of the cost of the snags.