On Tuesday this week we all went to Kevin’s place. There was a bit of storm as we all got there and once inside we forgot about that. Some work has been done to the timber shunting section of the layout. Some building are coming together. I took my Auscision railbus and an ESU stay alive capacitor and while at the meeting, PK attached the three wires and “Bob’s your Uncle”. It was installed and working. Darren also brought along an item that they were throwing out at his work. He gifted it to me. It is a place for me to install the lanyards that operators have on my layout when we have an ops session. The lanyard used on the layout have a piece of foam board on the end and it allows operators to attach their Timetable Card to the board and make notes on it etc. So the item has been screwed to the door of the shed, for use on Operating Session days.
On Wednesday afternoon, Darren dropped off four lengths of plasterer’s angle while I was at work and the family were visiting the Mother-in-law. I paint the plasterer’s angle white and use it as a lighting pelmet on the layout for my LED strip lighting above the layout. These four lengths were painted on Saturday morning. The next task was to install some lighting support above South Brisbane Interstate Station. So with the help of a couple of clamps, a length of 42 x 19 pine was installed 15 inches above the baseboard. This was about 4.5m of lighting. The frame has now been painted all over. I still need to install a roll of LED lights, but I think that is a job for maybe next week.
With Thursday Australia Day, I took the opportunity to go back down the shed and continue doing work. Basically it was cleaning stuff off the top of the layout around Acacia Ridge Yard. The aim was to then relocate the small shelf I have here to further around towards the door. That was done with the help of my son to lift it while I reattached it to the layout. I also had a bit of clean up under the layout under Acacia Ridge Yard. Some old wood was thrown out.
The last job I did on Thursday was to install some foam near the spiral beside the Rocla Sleeper siding, between Grafton Yard and Rappville Loop. Plastering will occur later on. I also cut up a number of signs identifying the staff machine on the layout at every location. I have just realised that I forgot the Nammoona Ballast Siding Staff Hut sign for the fascia. I can print that one off at anytime. The signs had initially been placed next to where they will be glued on the fascia. I also painted a couple of small sections of fascia black. I also added a few new small sections of fascia and also painted those black. The rest of the staff machine signs have now been installed.
On Friday morning I visited Aurora Trains and ran into Darryl and Chris. The things you see…. On Saturday morning I shot over to Modeller’s Warehouse and saw a mate Adam. On my way home, a visited Hobby One and then popped into Arthur’s who had an operation during the week and had only just come home. I had to drop off some PK purchases.
On Friday I received an order of NOBX wagons from Auscision, which I shared with a few other modellers. I also received an ebay delivery that I had been waiting for a few weeks, that was sent to a nearby street to the same house number. The tenant at that house, dropped it in after he returned from holidays. These switches were installed on Saturday and connected up to control some street lights near Cassino.
Friday afternoon’s job was to splice in a re-arrangement to the point work at Grafton Yard and Grafton Loco. That was followed by soldering on the track bus wires to the new section of track. When I realigned the trackwork into Grafton yard, replacing the 3-way point with a standard right-hand point, I had to rearrange all the track work in Grafton Loco. I almost had the opportunity to add another siding here, but I thought not. I’m still left with 15 dead end sidings in Grafton Loco for locos, railmotors and various special load wagons. So I have tested this new trackwork and all is good.
I have started installing a model of the Boundary Road road-overbridge which was a suggestion by the learned crew from the previous weekend. A sort of scenic break. Today I went to Jaycar and picked up some resistors and these have been added to the street light circuit at Cassino. These were 1Watt resistors as the previous resistors I was using were getting pretty hot.
I still have a few jobs on my 'to do' list which hopefully I will tick off this week. It includes more fascia, more painting, building a new power supply and some plastering. I will resurrect my old phone system between Grafton Yard/Acacia Ridge Yard and North Coast Control. Holidays can be fun. I might also make it over to the Club one day.