2015_02_02 Search Engine :)

2015_02_02

Not a lot of stuff that I could post the last week or so. Mainly because I have been sorting through the temporary wiring, removing Tail light short protectors, and wiring no longer needed and setting up the NCE District circuit breakers.  Time consuming but really necessary, because I need to tidy up the wiring and secure it under the deck, out of sight, before I can install my LED lighting strips.

At the same time I have had a persistant short that trips the DB150 Command station every 30 seconds or so. Trial and error searching. First isolate command station, then add one district at a time till I find the cause. Because the Branch line is already connected to two NCE Circuit breakers and all tail light protection has been removed, I left that till last. After all I had already corrected many wiring errors caused by old wiring left in place after new wiring was added in its new roll as a fixed layout branch line.

However after reconnecting, and repairing all the sections, the persistent short was found to be in the Trentham to Bularto branch sections.
So today I started unplugging and testing all the droppers. I have not finished, however just before I came inside tonight, I have the positive feed connected to the to the Trentham side NCE breaker, without the fault. As soon as I connect the negative feed, I get the short. So I have an unknown connection on the negative return between the top level track and Trentham, or a cross feed between Trentham and Bularto.  Should not take long to find it now.

As well over the last 15 years I have been collecting RUB cars so that I can make my Daylight set. I have found about 6 cars and at least 12 are still missing. And so I started searching for the missing cars, because I have a friend who has found someone to build them for me.  But over all these years, I have no idea where they may be. So earlier today I began opening boxes and searching. Whilst doing that I found stuff I had forgotten I had. So as I need to clear a space for the installation of the branch terminus, I started moving stuff around in the boxes and stacking them up under the layout, to clear some room along the front wall.

Yes not much to show, but I did find 15 Locos that need DCC chips and a few to sell as well.

Mostly empty boxes, but I want to keep them so that in the future, my kids will have them when they sell off my stuff.
I did move about 20% of this pile to here...

Australian Rolling stock not on layout, and others that need work done before commissioning :)

Here is the BG coming up the grade off House Creek. The gradient is too steep for Austrains T Class and the Auscision one as well.  I cut the supports down to soften the gradient and smooth out the climb.

First lifted out the track, removed the screws then using this nifty tool, easily took 2cm out of the bearers to smooth out the grade.

This is as much as I can take out without exasperating the grade to the top of the hill. However  the T Class still stalls. A two dollar coin laid on top of the T was all it needed to climb the hill. I will have to lower the summit over top of the  Albury line, to get it right. But I wanted 10.5 cm clearance and that will mean I will only have 8.2 cm, not enough for Double stacks, which I thought someone might want to run. but not now I guess :(

Under the wayward SG track yet to be laid you can see the track bed heading to Albury. Directly above it just this side of the white wire hanging down the high point of the top level needs to be dropped 2cm or so, you can almost see the hill in the pic?

So nothing stopping me from installing the 46" radius SG track to the Loop points about 3 m around the corner and that completes all the SG track that I can lay at this stage.

Then I need to wire in all the yards and finish installing the circuit breakers and points.

Now I must find a home for all the boxes in the corner and I can start installing bench work for the Branch Terminus that friend Tony donated to the cause.

But that will have to wait for another day :)
Cheers
Rod

2015_01_22 Its Hot!

The kids arrived home from Bemm River on Saturday and I headed down to Kilmore East, where my caravan has been stored. Visited Mum and Dad via Suburban train and Thursday hitched up the van and headed for Bendigo. Parked it in full sun, and am slowly being cooked :(
Tomorrow is a rest day (Hope it rains....please :)

Then early Saturday I have a few dollars to spend at Corio Model Railway Exhibition.

Tony and I should get there for opening :)  I guess I will see some of you there ?

Trains?  absolutely nothing happening, but will see what Saturday brings :)
Cheers
Rod Young

Advertisement?

I am looking to buy a NSW Rub set up to 8 cars (the one Silvermaz sells?)  It has to be built and suitable to run as a Daylight (Sydney to Melbourne) set  Either second hand or built new by a good modeller
:)

2015_01_13 David asks?

This is the stuff. added water and it becomes a smooth paste and takes about 15 minutes to go off
Cheers

2015_01_12 ??

2015_01_12
Opened the studio door, turned on the air conditioner, and went and started to clean the swimming pool, hang out my washing and wash the car, at about 8.00pm remembered the studio, went and turned off the air and locked it up and went and watched TV :)

Now you know why I don't post all the time ;)
Cheers
Rod

2015_01_11 Bridge is in!

2015_01_11

Just fitted in place for now to allow trains to run. I know I have concrete coloured paint and a special red for the girders, but where did I hide them?

So now I can finish of the trestle. I needed to stand on a chair to cut the bridge in and reconnect track and wiring.  Will have to do the same for the scenery, but I will wait for my mate to come back as he will want to experiment with me on this too.

Ok found a short today. Well not exactly, i discovered I have a short in an unprotected section. Trains run for 3 or 4 minutes then Digitrax short protection fires up and resets. Have not made any changes in the unprotected sections so what could it be?

I have four reverse loops protected with electronic devices. Has one failed?
The weather is hot, has a rail expanded enough to touch where it is not meant to?
Has a wire pulled away and shorted another bus?

These things can take up a lot of time. I ran through every section with a LED track tester. All frogs are live and operate correctly. All track circuits have power.
But the LED tester only tells you the rails are connected to power, and so I am now testing with a meter, across rail joints If I get a circuit on the same side protected with an insulated joiner, I have found my problem. So far one reversing device has been found disconected. But it did not solve this problem...  keep looking....

Cheers
Rod

2015_01_10 It Rains? The bridge isn't in!

2015_01_10

Not doing a lot, just fiddling with the bridge and the stock yard.
The stock yard needs to be smaller. The pencil line marks max width available.

Need to have two yards with access to each loading ramp and a race at the rear linking the yards to the side loading / unloading motor transports. Still a ways to go. Cant find a glue that holds it firmly, apart from supa glue.

So here is the more modern beam bridge behind the trestle.
The photo shows that I need to release the trackbed to left of picture because of the sharp incline meeting the bridge. The abutment on the right is a whisker low and requires packing.

After packing the abutments I will cut away the track bed to locate wing walls on both sides of bridge. Paint the abutments and the wings with concrete and all I need to do is blend in the scenery.

should look ok when finished?  The non-prototypical aspects will be hidden by the track.

Not as much as I wanted to get finished, but every little bit does count.... Now where is that paint?

Cheers
Rod

2014_01_04 Bridge building for dummies?

2014_01_04 The trouble with scenery?

It just leads from one thing to another ;)

I really wanted to design and build a stock race for Wodonga, using a Walther's kit to save time.
Yeah well ??  I have no idea what the instructions are showing and the written translation has no effect on me at all :(.
Fortunately I was able to get pictures of a finished model, and already I have a good idea how it went together, but first....

The scenery on the branch.. as usual let the pictures tell the story.

 click to enlarge
The bench was cleaned up only a week ago :(
I have some metal bridge abutments left over from a previous bridge building session. These ADAIR kits are metal and need to be glued together and filled and then painted.

The last time I used them was to build 4 bridges at House Creek Wodonga. Now where did I tidy up the paint to?

I did not have any girders, and these Plastruct beams were too large for the cut outs in the abutments.
I have cheated and cut out slots (Easier to cut out styrene slots than file down metal)
I think that when I fill and paint them, you will not be able to see what I have done.

Next job is to cut out the existing road bed and secure the track either side of the bridge with new uprights. I slightly extended the top of the L Girder to sit the bridge on top. I had to shorten the abutment by 15mm. fortunately as it was glued together, I simply removed one layer of metal and reassembled the abutment.
I wanted to lay a timber deck on top, as per the prototype VR bridges. However I ran out of height.

Now which box has the paint gun and paint hidden away inside?
Cheers
Rod

2015_01-02 Another beginning?

2015_01-02  Scenery bases

Supporting the paper mache plaster mix  on pink towels.

Blending in the new bridge and the old one.

Dry, strong and ready to fix the track down Its 36 Radius and will have code 70 instead of the old code 100.
Pretty happy with the way it all turned out too.
The paper mache and plaster mix is grey in colour and fluffy out of the box.
I bought it from an Art Supply House in Albury, in a 10 kg box. I mixed 4 cups of  dry material with a cup and half of water, add burnt sienna and yellow ochre water based paint with some cement colour to form the base.
After 24 hours I had a very hard shell, it was difficult to spread on the toweling though.So I might try dipping the towel in it and forming it into terrain shapes then let it dry. When it dries it should be stiff enough to hold a second thick coat of  paper mache which can be formed much easier.
Cheers
Rod

2014_12_31 The end has come?

2014_12_31 The end and yet the World did not?

Just thinking about things :)
I have always wanted to make small round holes quickly. Well ever since sound started to interest me, and I found speakers required baffles.

I asked everyone I knew had faced this problem, but could not get a definitive answer

Here is a loksound 8 ohm speaker. The accepted way of cutting out a circle for the front of the baffle is to draw around it, drill out the middle with many small holes then break it out and clean up with a file. My attempts wasted half a day and I had to then fill in the gaps before it all worked as it should...Yeah I know, I think the same all the time.

So then I started to search for a workable easy to use hole cutter!

Yes you can ream it out, but then you have to file away another 6 mm around the edges, I never did find a ream big enough.

You could use these things, but they are harsh and more often tear out the edges and dont leave a neat enough hole. And you cannot get one at 23mm 21 and 25 but no 23! So more filing out.

My Chinese contractor sold me this for $6 and free postage. The thing weighs half a kilo and apparently you need a lathe to mount it, and somehow winding it up springs out the blades till you get a 23 mm hole. I could not spin it with anything I have here, and using a shifter and  a vice, I could not turn the nut on the end.

I found this nifty device in a craft magazine. It does cut a nice hole in glass but could not cope with styrene at all.
Mind you if I ever get around to it, I am pretty certain that I could replace the glass cutting wheel with a fixed knife blade it would do exactly what I want.

But then
When ordering styrene shapes from China, I found this...

And it is actually a plastic version of the Canadian glass cutter, and it works really well :D

JQG18 Nine Sea Compass Circle Cutter Cutting Tool 1cm-30cm Diameter NEW
evemodel_ca (4635 )
99.8% Positive feedback
eBay item number:
171163537839

So now I am happy!
Cheers
Rod

2014_12_24 Its Christmas :D

 2014_12_24 Christmas Eve
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all.

My Wife came from Finland and apart from Vodka and Beer they loved their Christmas on Christmas Eve.

Here two generations celebrate their own way :D

Tess is getting a little worried because the shadows are getting longer, and Santa has not yet arrived.

Some of the older kids are not so worried, each trying to outdo the adults with death defying feats of high jumping.

And even more waiting!

Finally lights and sirens are heard as a late Santa arrives in the Yackandandah Fire Stations Big Pumper! All the kids scampered up into the cab to check out the pre... eh the truck.

Finally everybody retired to the lawn where the next several hours were much enjoyed by the kids opening presents with the Adults looking on. We much enjoy this little bit of family tradition, and the vodka must have caught up, because I never got a picture :(

Well Christmas Dinner was next on the agenda.

Here Billy sits beside Riitta. Well its her Christmas tea shirt and it is placed over the chair she always sat on, when she was still with us. Sort of hope she still comes along all these years since breast cancer took her away from us.

On the Model Train front?

Now that all the gremlins have been found and sorted, trains can circulate the layout, even if SG freights do have to run through Trentham   eeek!! Bit rough!!
So a lot of train running and little work, other than fixing up problems as they are found.

One set of points not switching the frog here, so I will need to put another mono frog juicer in.

A week before Christmas, Graeme Schulz arrived with his spatulas and we decided to play around with some scenery.
This is an artist paper mache plaster mix we were put on to. Its mixed into a ice cream container with water and plastic paint to colour like dirt.And Cement colours sprinkled on top.to simulate dirt. Woodland Scenic's greens for effect. Hard shell hard to chip, yet still easy enough to cut out and fix problems, should they occur.

After Graeme left I decided how I was going to fix the causeway bridge and splice in the new section I got on E-Bay. I did most of the work gluing in new bridge girders under the rails.

The new bridge over the creek has a trestle support next to the far abutment, which has to be removed and put at the other (far) end.
Then it will look like the trestle was built at two different times. Perhaps fixing a wash a way?

Anyway that's about all I have done:)
Till next time,
Rod Young

2014_12_13- Roger visits

2014_12_13

A great weekend with a visit from Roger Lloyd up from Melbourne with wife Marie.
I met the train at New Wodonga and Marie went on to Albury to stay with her sister(s). Roger and I transferred by road to the old Wodonga Station where copious measurements were taken in preparation of the building of Wodonga Station in HO scale. We collected a few pictures a full set of plans from VicTracks and our own measurements. The hardest thing we had to figure out, was what remains of the the station now, and how to make it look like it did in the 70's We would love to see your pictures? If anybody can help us out here?
 As usual Roger spurred me on to do some more on the layout when we returned to the house in Osbornes Flat via Yackandandah :D
We did a heap of work, adding a few more tracks but proving the wiring and short proofing the track work and the droppers, which of course a picture cannot show!. However a job well done. The Stockyards and all track East of the BG main line is now DCC  wired and only needs a few "juicers" added and the droppers connected to the section breaker to run trains  Imagine that!!

Although not a true representation of the yard, it does retain enough to keep two yard pilots operating for a night, we both guess.

Altough Roger already laid this track a year ago, we found it necessary to lift and relay it to fix all the insulaton problems and apply the droppers. As an example over 60 insulated joiners and 120 droppers were added. just to guarantee the integrity of all the track sections. I solder droppers to both sides of every point, also to the blades themselves and lastly one to the live frog.

Roger measured up the Wodonga Station area and the Goods shed. We adjusted tracks accordingly. We now can fit a scale model of both buildings. The compromise will be the yard beyond the Goods shed.

As can be seen from the above shot we cannot fit in the Carriage sheds or the loco. So we will move these to the North over High Street. This will mean the hand gates (formally used to bring the SG into Wodonga Depot will now be added back in to feed the new loco Depot.

The long road behind the "Box" is a SG engine storage road, because engines were not stored at Albury

And beside Roger you can see we addded the two BG store roads where generally L and M vanswere stored to service the stock race.


Cheers
Rod Young