MERG Kit Arrives

Last Saturday while at the RMCQ Model Train Exhibition, Greg handed over his recently received MERG purchase.  I had asked him to order some MERG kits for me.  So on Monday I assembled one of the Servo mounts that I ordered.  I had one spare servo, so I worked out how it gets mounted.  I just then needed to find the servo white actuation lever and connect it to the Servo mount.  I still can't find my actuation level components - I must have put them in a safe place.  I can then try and mount it on a test board so I can play with it.  I now want to see if I can get any feedback from the servo when it reaches it full throw on the points it will be controlling.  I will play around with that.  I have just ordered 10 more servo motors to play with.  They should rock up later this week.

I will also be building a failsafe/emergency control panel that can be swapped into my future exhibition layout if the Signalman’s Panel suffers a cataclysmic event.  That way I will still be able to throw the servo controlled points on the layout, as they will be controlled by servo motors.  With out the control logic commanding the servo motors, the points will all be dead in the water, unable to be changed.

I continue to think about how I will build my emergency control panel for my servos and I recently picked up some components from Jaycar to further its progress.

Saturday was the latest NMRA Gathering.  We had good numbers at Sparkle's place.  We also had a couple of good presentations and we heard from a number of attendees from my last Ops Session talking about their experiences.  We had an aim to introduce operations to a number of interested people and we are helping them get exposure to this AP.  We also got to see the progress on Sparkle's N scale layout.

This coming week I head down to Sydney with Bob, where we meet up with Smithy and Paul for some activities which centre around the Rosehill Great Model Train Show.  It will be good catching up with my Sydney based friends.  I have some purchases lined up to make while down there.

RMCQ 2026 Model Train Exhibition

This week started with 3 days up at Caloundra with the boss visiting one of her girl friends.  What a brilliant view we had. 

After that start to the week, I struggled to do anything hobby related, apart from packing the car with what I was taking to this weekend’s RMCQ Model Train Exhibition at the Brendale Sports Complex.  What a great weekend we had!  Great Venue.  Good Layouts in attendance.  Good assistance and company on the NMRA Stand, really good numbers through the doors and reasonably priced food.

I sat at the modelling table with 3 other modellers on Saturday and Sunday.  I completed 8 industrial bins on Saturday, and about 9 clotheslines on Sunday.  I had two animations on my table.  One was a clothesline that spun around, with the mum hanging off it.  This was all on a 90mm end cap and was from a previous competition at a convention.  My second one was an old 6m x 6m garage, with a tilt-a-door where the door would open and close at the pressing of a button.  This was an Arduino Uno controlling a servo linked to the tilt-a-door.

Both of these drew many comments, laughs, and the beginnings of many conversations with the public, hence not much modelling done.  I also had an entry in the RMCQ modelling comp.  My entry was a flickering station platform light that finally answered how many people does it take to replace a  light bulb?  One station light would flicker for a while, (again controlled via an Arduino Uno) then the light would come good for 20 seconds and then repeat the process.  There were three workers standing around trying to fix the flickering light.

A view of the oil siding on the Amby West layout by Arthur Hayes MMR.

A great industrial complex on this layout just inside the front door to the exhibition.

Darren and I took the equipment from the NMRA stand back to Paul’s place for storage after the exhibition.

Now what to do next week?

Post Op Session Fixups

Monday was 'fix up the layout' day following the Operations Session on the day before, last weekend.  Basically I soldered a wire around a point, but this time it was the other end of the wire I soldered the previous week.  So when I change that point I now have power to the staff machines.  I adjusted the wires to an NCE QSNAP and it was working again.  It was now throwing points.  A point at the southern end of Border Loop had a bad point blade for the mainline.  That was superglued and now seems to work.  While running some trains, I found one point in South Brisbane Interstate Yard was not throwing in one direction.  I started tracing the point wiring and found no issues.  So I manually toggled the point and sure enough it is now throwing back and forth.  You can not make this stuff up.  It just happens.

I adjusted one train that was put into a track in a yard that I advised, but it was the wrong track.  So I fixed this up.  I adjusted the coupling heights on two wagons, by adding some washers under the bogie.  I swapped out one 44 class loco for another 44 class, as the old 44 class loco had wheels that kept going out of gauge and derailing on points.  So the person who drives that train again should get a better experience next time.

 

I also double checked the North Coast Controller’s headset, and I found no issues with it.  It seemed to be working.  As previously said, it probably was operator error.

 

I had a look at the timetable and realised that there was one train that had almost completed its run and was stopped a couple of loops short of its destination, and then by looking ahead at the next few timetable cards it showed that the next 8 cards needed to be run some of the way through their runs to be at the same time.  So I adjusted the fastclock time and I ran all 8 trains to where they should be at the same time.  So it will be 15:10 in the timetable when we next run.  I did quite a bit of shunting to get those trains to that point, so I probably deprived some people of that activity.

 

I have no idea when the next session will be.  But there will be one on the 28^th of December this year after a request from one regular to delay my normal Christmas session by a day.

 

Thursday was a day to finally look at my modelling project for the upcoming RMCQ exhibition.  I butchered some code up for my Arduino and gave it a test run.  It worked first time.  Now I just need to build my model.  That was Friday’s job.  The model will have a subterranean Arduino underneath the above ground detail.  I built up a step ladder.  I found some trees and some workers.  So early next week I will finish off the track and platform and do some terra forming, scenery and ballasting.