Don't You Hate That?

On Friday I got an email from Arthur, asking if I was available over the weekend as he wanted to come over and evaluate my trackwork for my CIVIL AP.  So we made arrangements for a Sunday meet. 

So on Saturday I went to the shed just before midday and decided to clean the track around my three pieces of trackwork that needed to be assessed.  So I started with my dual gauge point in Acacia Ridge Yard.  Things ran quite well. 

I then moved to the Clapham Yard and tested the gauge splitter track.  I ran a standard gauge train – loco and 4 wagons over the dual gauge splitter in both directions.  I also ran a narrow gauge locos and 5 wagons through the splitter in both directions.  So that was all good.

Next test was to run trains through the narrow gauge conversion or 3rd rail transfer track.  This changes the third rail from one side to the other, i.e. from the left and side to the right hand side.  So I ran a standard gauge loco through the track and everything was good.  I then ran the narrow gauge train through the track.  It ran pretty well as well.  However, I did discover that I needed to clean some ballast out of the flangeways.  But while running the narrow gauge trains, just past this piece of track, the train was getting into trouble on some other pieces of track.  So I spent some time trying to adjust that piece of track.  I needed to adjust the joint, as there was some mis-match in the rail heights and one of the rails was out of gauge.  So I adjusted that and now the narrow gauge trains run a lot better. 

However, when I was running trains on the layout, I all of a sudden got no power in one of my power districts.  It was pulling quite a few amps.  I had no idea what the cause of this short circuit was.  I could turn the power off and on and it would go away,  So that is not a good thing.

But I did decide that I would have to make a small adjustment in the track layout in one section at the dead end of the dual gauge tracks in Acacia Ridge Yard.  I have a curve that I realised is far too tight.  I did plan to do that after Arthur leaves.  So eventually after Arthur did leave, I did rip that section of track up and relocated a set of points about 10cm to the right and now I believe travel through this area is much smoother.  However, I will have to spend some time next weekend reinstalling all the track jumper wires.  That could be a bit of a mammoth task.  I also have to adjust the point throw on a tillig dual gauge point.  It was controlled by a DPDT switch imbedded into the baseboard and connected to the point blades, but as the point changed location, the switch needs to as well.  However, there is no longer any room for the switch at the new location.  So I might have to run it through some sort of pivot linkage and locate the switch at 90 degrees to the track, just to fit it in.  We will see.

So getting back to Arthur.  He rocked up at the appointed time and ran some trains through the various pieces of track.  Well two worked pretty well, but the third was causing issues with all my standard gauge locos derailing as they went through it.  This was not happening the day before, and even a couple of hours before Arthur arrived, when I tested it again.  So I have no idea what was occurring, maybe it was temperature related.  So the end result is I will throw that dual gauge point out and make a new one.  So that is a job for the next couple of weeks, when I get all the components.  It doesn't take an intellectual giant to work out I would have fail my CIVIL AP.  

Epic Fail.  Oh well, there is always next time.

I'm still waiting for the local hobby shop to get my plastic brick sheet in.  Apparently the distributor had everything but that, as I went back on Saturday morning and his stand was overflowing but not the one I wanted.

What a Great Hobby!

Last Sunday as usual I updated my blog documenting my activities and then a few hours later in my in-box was an electronic version of the plan that I had already obtained from the NSW railway archives.  It was sent from an acquaintance in NSW.  How good was that?  The electronic version was in the form of a TIF file.  This file format allows the drawing to scale and not cause the lines to grow in width.  It is a high quality graphics file format.

I did not see the email correspondence until the next morning.  After an exchange of emails, the drawing of the Casino Refreshment Rooms also appeared curtesy of this same person.  That certainly saved me from trying to contract the ARHS to see if they had a copy of that particular document in their archives.

Anyway, I also received a couple of other plans for Casino based items, in particular the Shunters and Examiners Accommodation, Workshop and Store.  This is one of the next items that I need to scratch build.  Thank you very much Bob!

I am currently waiting for a phone call from the local hobby shop to advise that their delivery of brick sheet has arrived.  Then I can start cutting up the sides of the station building and then the refreshment rooms.  I think that these station buildings will take me for the rest of the year to fully complete.

So today, while looking for things to do to while away the time, I painted up two AR Kits NOCY wagons.  I think one of these will swap places with another of my scratch build NOCYs that I made many years ago, and it will now be my match truck on my oil train.  I also spread a small amount of paint over a small section of plaster I laid in Kyogle the other weekend.

I then re-painted the old scratch built NOCY wagon whose paint job was chronic.  It was painted when I was running out of paint and there may have been bits that were not well painted at all.  So now the wagon also looks pretty good.  I then got around to applying decals to the two AR Kits NOCYs.

I finally updated my timetable cards for my oil train – both loaded and unloaded cards.  I also gave the train a bit of a run, and one wagon kept uncoupling.  So the troublesome wagon was taken aside and some time was spent trying to work out the best way to remedy the low coupling height issue.  So eventually I took some cotton and rigged it between the buffers with super glue and up under the coupler, so now it has lifted the coupler to be almost perfect.  We will see how long this solution lasts.

I also looked at adjusting the goods shed at Old Cassino.  This has been hit one too many times on the layout, by operators and some trains.  But it just needs re-seating on the layout.  The roof sections also need to be glued to the building.  This will also give it some rigidity.  So I will finish this job this coming weekend.

Just Getting my Breathe

I feel like I have nothing to do on the layout at the moment, that will inspire me.  So I have turned to doing some construction of some structures.  But it seems to have been one step forward, and then two steps backwards, then two steps forward and then another step backwards.  But I think I am making some slight progress.

So this week I did not do anything in the shed, except about 15 minutes of work on Friday afternoon.  I mixed up a couple of very small batches of plaster and added these along Kyogle near where Anzac parade goes.  That was all.  The only other activity I did in the shed was look for my old AMRI buildings which are models of NSW suburban brick station buildings.  They were somewhere in the shed.  It took me a while but I eventually found them.  I have at least 3 and a half of these items.  My original plan was to use these buildings, via a cut and shunt method of construction to help construct my Cassino station building.  I also had a NSWR plan for the Cassino Station Building & Signal Room.  I purchased this and lots of other items many, many years ago.

So on Friday afternoon, I got out my many photos of the Cassino Station building, printed two to an A4 page and sticky taped these together into a section by section picture for the Cassino station building.  It was slightly difficult to identify what went where, but eventually I pieced together 4 strings of photos.  I used my photos and a lot more photos that were taken by my mate Paul from the Sunshine Coast.  He took these many years ago, and I scanned them for him and together with his photos, it helped me to get my photos in order.  The Cassino station building is actually two separate buildings joined under the one roof.  The southern building is actually the Cassino Station Building.  So this accounted for 2 strings of photos, the back platform side and the main platform side.  The northern building is the Cassino Refreshment Room.  I also created two strings of photos for this building as well.

My plan for the station building shows the plan view as well as the back platform side drawing view.  It is amazing that these are very similar to my photos.  The only difference being that one of the openings from the back platform through to a walkway, was bricked up.  No doubt done some time around 1991, when the back platform was put out of use, filled in and made into a roadway for busses to use.

After studying the plan, I found out that the distance between the thickened beams that support the corbels and hence the brackets that support the roof, is different to those on the suburban station buildings.  The suburban station buildings are on about 11’ centres according to another NSWR plan I have.  The Cassino station buildings has these at about 13’ 3” on average according to my calculations.  The AMRI model is just over 11’ centres.  So back to my strategy of using these station kits to help build the Cassino station building.  Well having the section a different size was a bit of bad luck, and made me think of alternatives.

So I decided to look at some brick embossed plastic sheet and see if I could make my own building sides from scratch.  I will still look at re-using the thickening posts and the corbels and the windows and doors out of those kits if possible in my construction.  The brick I am looking at using is from Ratio and they do a Flemish bond pattern, just like the actual station building.  Not that I will be able to see this, but you will up close.  These sheets were ordered today at the local hobby shop and should be here next week.

I have created an HO scale drawing of the back platform side of the station building, with all the scale dimensions on it.  The NSWR plan is nowhere near scale, and I don’t have access to my work photocopier, which if I did, I would just do one print of my page, scaled up at about 1.62 times and it should be near enough to HO scale.  But we are not allowed in the office for a few weeks yet at work.  So no harm done.

I will probably do the main platform HO scale drawing later tonight.  I spent some time this arvo trying to pull apart my AMRI station buildings to get to the basic building blocks I need to detail my station building.  Most came off very easily, and a couple were damaged, but I think I will end up with more than enough components.

A Positive Weekend

So on Friday afternoon I could not get motivated to do anything.  Maybe some of that was because my daughter was not feel well on Wednesday night/ Thursday morning.  She went for a Covid test on Thursday morning and we thought we could be in lock down for a week.  

On Saturday morning we got the answer and she was negative.  A big relief.  No one else in the house had any symptoms.  I was experimenting about how to install a single LED into my ambulance.  I was trying fibre optics, (well fishing line) but I was not getting a good light out the top.  So I decided that I would just mount the LED straight up inside the ambulance.

I was contemplating how to put two LED lights into my fire engine.  Again it turned out that I needed to disassemble it and drill some holes for the LEDs and the wires up through the cab and place them next to the blue lights on the roof.  When testing these at the workbench they seemed to work OK.

So on Saturday afternoon I decided to go to the shed and install my Arduino for drill the holes up through the baseboard for my disco lights in my community hall.  So I drilled those holes, pushed the wires up thought the baseboard and then through the community hall.  I turned the Arduino on and the hall was really bopping along.  A future task is to add the MP3 player so we have sound as well.

So the next task was to run wires from the Arduino to the fire engine on the layout.  These were run and then the wires were run to the ambulance.  The holes through the baseboard were drilled and the wires fed through the holes and soldered up to the fire engine and the ambulance.  These were tested and seemed to work OK with a 3V power supply.

Work then resumed back at the computer merging two Arduino programs into one.  I merged the code for the Disco event at the hall to the flashing light program and there was no issues.  No compile errors at all.  My skills must be coming back. I ran the program and there was a slight issue with the flash rate.  I made a change in two places and re-tested and all was good.  

Late on Saturday night I realised that back on the layout I was delivering the wrong polarity to one side of the flashing lights were delivering to the ambulance, fire engine and police car.  I also realised that I had not installed my inline resistor to the various flashing lights in the cars.  That was my problem sitting at the kitchen table doing some testing on Saturday morning.  I blew up two small red LEDs, on a 3 V power supply.  So I devised my work schedule for Sunday for when I got down to the shed.

So early on Sunday I steadily went through my list of tasks.  I rewired my flashing lights to be a common 5 V instead of GND.  I then added the resistors to the circuits. I swapped the Arduino I had on the layout, for one with the new program in it that had both the Disco code and the flash light code for the emergency vehicles.  I turned the Arduino on and the disco raged away.  But my flashing lights did not flash.  It had me perplexed for about 15 seconds, until I saw that the plugs for the ambulance and the fire engine were just dangling down in front of me, and not plugged into the Arduino.  Well that was a bit of a problem!  But very easily fixed.  So I did and guess what?  They worked!

So later on I was looking at how to remove my existing police car from the layout - it had various wires running into it.  It had headlight and taillights that worked and and flashers on the roof that did not work.  I through I had blown the flashing LED lights a couple of years ago and needed to work out how to remove them from the car on the layout keeping the other wires and lights in tact.  This was done and the flashers were taken to the work bench to determine how to add new LED lights to the car.  I just happened to test the old flashing lights and wouldn’t you know.  They actually flashed.  It must have been a dry solder joint that was causing it not to flash.  So these were old flashing lights were returned to the old police car and now that is working fine. 

So I then had to dig around and find another car that I could add my own Arduino powered flashing lights to.  The car was found, disassembled, and provision for lights made.  However, this old car, already had front and rear lights.  But these were not working.  So I have been distracted by trying to get these lights to work.  Tonight I think I will make an executive decision and throw that car away and grab another car from the layout and drill some more holes in it for the my flashers, but I will check that the headlight and tail lights work first.

Light at the End of the Tunnel

This week I spent quite a bit of time trying to adjust some Arduino code that I wrote to get realistic flashes on some LEDs to simulate Police car flashing lights, Fire truck flashing lights and an ambulance’s lights.  I think I mastered that quite well.  I had planned to have these all installed by this weekend, but that never happened.  I also re-wrote my disco flashing lights code and had them working well on my test bench.  This is for my local Community Hall located at Fairy Hill.  The next task is sound as well as lights - but that is a few weeks off.  All these lights will be controlled by an Arduino.  So I have the two pieces of code, the flashing lights for the emergency service vehicles, and the flashing light for the disco in a loco hall working separately.  I now have to merge the two pieces of code into a single program in my Arduino.  That will occur next weekend.  

My weekend started on Friday afternoon when I installing a small shelf under Fairy Hill on the layout on which my Arduino (to control the all the lights) will be located.  I should be able to provide power to the Arduino at that location easily enough.  My plan is to have a switch on the fascia of the layout in various locations to turn the various scenes with flashing lights off.  So separate switches for the police car, fire engine, ambulance and the disco.  Instead of just having the Arduino keep running and going through the various parts of the program for each set of lights, and me just turn off the common wire in the circuit to those lights so they extinguish – and potentially make the program very simple, I went down a rabbit hole.  And sitting back now, I have no idea why I did that.  Those switches on the fascia are read by the Arduino and in that program running on the Arduino it just skips the particular flashing light code for whatever needs to be not run.  Sitting here now, I just wonder why I decided to do that stupid technique.  Oh Well!

Anyway, on Friday night and Saturday I started installing all the wiring for the local Community Hall disco so it would reach from the Arduino on the shelf to the Hall on the layout.  But I was doing this on my work bench.  When completed it would be taken out to the layout and installed.  I would do a bit or work, test it.  Do a bit more test it.  Everything was going well.  However, when I plugged the jumpers into this small section of PCB board they would not work.  It just had to be bad contacts by the jumper pins in the PCB board holes.  Too small a pin, or too large a hole and very bad contact was made.  I wanted to not solder the last lot of jumpers for the 6 LEDs, from the PCB to inside the hall, so I could remove them from the layout easily if required.  I decided to solder these connections as well.  Then I also had trouble soldering to this old piece of PCB.  It was very annoying.  So I went out this morning and bought a new piece of PCB from Jaycar and used that.  So this afternoon I created a new PCB, connected the wires and Perfect! 

So the disco scene is now working very well.  But the time ran out on the weekend.  I might have watched the cricket on TV instead.  So next weekend, I will update the two pieces of code (lights and disco) into a single program, and then lay the wires to the various emergency vehicles to flash the lights.  I expect some issues with the wires going into the various vehicles, but will be next week’s problem.

Today I also watched about 85 minutes of trains running and commentary on Dave Abeles layout in the US from midday today - local time.  There were at one stage 243 people from around the world watching these trains running.  We even had our mate Marty from the Gold Coast running a few of these trains.  A great day indeed.

Slow End to the Year

This week has been a strange one.  I have gone from full throttle to idle.  We had a cut down Operations Session on Monday, and then I had some issues to fix following that session.  These were documented in the last 2 blog updates.  These list of changes were completed quite quickly.  The last few days I seemed lost.  Without a purpose.  Not knowing where to go or what to do next.  So today I decided to create my list of the next lot of future tasks to do.  Optimistically I thought I would get through quite a few of the items on that list today.  Well I was way out. 

Back in early December I purchased some infrared controlled candle lights.  So today I started to pull a few of these candles apart, as I was going to splice one of these into my flickering ‘fire in an industrial bin’ at Park Road Siding.  Did you think I could get it to work?  I think I must have fried the first circuit, as it no longer turns on or off via the remote.  The fires just blazes away.  So I built a second IR control circuit and certainly that one was working.  So I spliced that in to the ‘fire in the industrial bin’ circuit and it now works.  Whoo Hoo!  My next task is to build a flashing light  circuit for the fire engine appliance that has visited Park Road Siding to extinguish the 'Fire in the Industrial bin'.  Again, this might be able to be set to turn the flashing fire engine appliance lights off when the crew has extinguished the ‘fire in the industrial bin’.

The next few items are to illuminate a number of flashing lights on some police cars and ambulances on the layout.  I also have a car with headlights where its headlights are not turning on.  I will get under the layout and check that out tomorrow.  I then need to start on the disco lights for the local community hall.

Also, to placate Marty, today I ran a CAT 5 cable from my router in the house to the shed where I have my wifi extender.  The cable can be unplugged and rolled back up when not in use, or not required.  I tested it all with everything in the house this afternoon.  So tonight I will probably get online and do it from the shed, just to prove to Marty that I can and it works.

Unfortunately I need to go back to work on Tuesday.