Running Trains and Treading Water

Motivation for this week has been down.  But I did do a bit of wheel cleaning and oiling on a couple of locos.  I pulled one 12mm loco apart and it had its wheel pickups not connected on one bogie.  So it took me a while to re-install this.  I did and gave the loco a test run.  I’m still going through the testing of my 12mm locos.  I am still working on the 12mm timetable testing.  That got boring and my attention turned to other activities.  I will go back to that this coming week.

My order of miniature magnets turned up.  Boy are they small!  I glued a couple to the Cassino Station building roof frame, and glued some to the roof as well.  Being so small, they did not create a large enough magnetic field to join the two pieces together solidly.  So I ordered some more larger magnets.  They will probably be here later this coming week.  I will see how they go.

Later in the week, I found a driver for the NSWGR DEB set.  It started at Cassino Yard and ran all the way to South Brisbane Interstate station.  It did have some issues climbing the grade out of Clapham Yard just outside Loco Pilly.  The set would grind to a halt up the grade.  It had me stumped.  I thought it was one of the rear carriages, having a wheel gauge causing some additional drag on the train though the last set of points it was travelling through.  It turned out the power car was sitting above a section of track that was dual gauge.  The third (inner) narrow gauge rail was a little bit high, proud of the of the two standard gauge rails.  It had broken away from the copper clad sleeper to keep it in gauge and level, and its excess height was rubbing under the power bogie of the DEB set.  As this section of track had been recently converted from dual gauge to only standard gauge, and I left the third rail in place to save some work, I could just remove that small section of rail.  Once this was done and the DEB set run over the section of track again, it ran with no issues.  The DEB set then ran all the way back to Grafton Yard and fits into the allocated siding. 

Late in the week, I spent some time in the shed scanning for useless pieces of junk to see at the Buy and Sell today.  Sunday was my Club's Buy and Sell day.  I actually sold quite a bit of stuff.  Oh did I mention that I bought quite a bit of stuff as well?  But the end result was I could pay back some debt to the boss.