2010 March 15

2010 March 15   Monday  (page14 of 35)

Not much on today 
Well it was a great weekend. I set up a TV in the train room, and watched Adelaide V/8 Super Cars. Nice to see the officials have dumped young Jamie as well as his streak of good luck
Yes Garth Tander had the slower car ,again, but his fuel lasted longer, allowing him to race to the very end.
Jamie is a magnificent driver. Calm and relaxed, but you get horribly bored when one driver wins everything ,meeting after meeting. I can think of one worse sport... Oval stock Car racing in the US. Trust the people who invented base ball and gridiron to come up with a banked mile long track, where cars go around... and around..go around... and around..go around... and around..go around... and around..go around... and around..go around... and around.. Are you dizzy yet? Well how come they all pit at the same time and still stay at the front.
Anyway model trains is the reason to be here.

 Over the weekend I installed a long yard at the bottom of the long wall. This yard should be moved to the other side of the aisle, once I start installing the coal siding, which will be the main yard on my model railway. It is loosely fixed and when it comes time to move, cross bearers will be laid taking into consideration where the point machines and wiring are situated, and it should be an easy relocation.
Trains arrive into two roads closest the wall. Engine runs around and it can move out on to main line and depart or set back into the third dead end storage road.

 Roads fit about 16 hoppers in the run a round roads, about 18 in the store road.

 A pair of interstate visitors sit on the engine road at Wangabanga (??) waiting return to Dynon. Victoria sometimes uses engines off the Jets to run trains between jobs between Melbourne and Adelaide. Not unusual to see 930's in Wang on a weekend during the wheat season.

 hmm I need to think about this one.. These SG Aurora cars are sitting in Wang Platform, obviously on the BG, in the 70's 80's time frame being modelled here.. hmm, I need to think on that, apart from not yet unpacking any coaches that might run on the BG...

 Nice group sitting in the late afternoon sun!
Looks like a new track panel is still to be fitted behind these engines!

 Just one more. The S and the 930 will run the Passenger train back on the Up, with a spare CW going on the front. S304 failed at Wodonga, and the pass is being hauled in behind T368 and Y129, which will come off and return to Wodonga, on the Down Goods.

Does not look like a lot of work, but every section of track has been soldered. Every point is DCC ready with a live frog, which needs to be operated via a Juicer, or a slide switch, to change the frog polarities.

Trying to straighten the track, evenly space it, drill out the wiring link holes, point machine operation hole etc etc, takes a hell of a lot of time. I am not a great solder person, but 160 joints, and trimming 150 wires to attach to, certainly becomes a little boring.

Anyway two small sections of track still to finish in the yards. After three days of long hours I claim to have made only one mistake in the wiring. That is one metal rail joiner was incorrectly placed on a frog rail, causing a short, which was quickly found.
Till next time?
Rod Young

 2010 March 20 Saturday     Yackandandah is Hot!  Is Magnificent place to live :D

Trying to use the Black and Decker drill stand as a milling machine. Ok for polishing, but useless as a cutter. The cutter distorted, and the so did the drill stand.

 Not a bad tool, lots of torque, and I use a transistor controller to drive it slowly.

 This is a C Class undressed! As you can see it is DC only, no colour coded wiring, 8 pin plug and it has no space for a lighting board or a speaker.

 See the small edges that match the posts on the untouched weight. They are fragile and broke off. I am hoping that I might be able to rejoin the nose weight to the body weight, but it appears to be stable as is, anyway.

After the nose weight fractured, I took more off to clear the speaker, which now sits clear of the gearbox and the sound should pass down over top of the front bogie.

 The inside roof edge was filed back a little and the side connection between cab and long hood was reduced by half. (see VR body to see what was removed.)

 Test fitting the speaker (surround or baffle) Note the speaker now sits higher and clears the cut away edges between cab and long hood.

 Compare this unmodified body with the V/Line set up to take a Loksound speaker.

 Here is the nose drilled out to take the tiny 1.8 mm sunny white LEDs I will file off the tip, and glue it to the body inside and use a short fibre optic lens to carry the light.
Just noticed how awful those whistles look. Have to replace them, for sure!

 Sunny white 3mm diode for headlight, again using a larger diameter fibre optic light tube.

 One of the few things I actually bought at Sandown Exhibition. This is an ATLAS track cleaning car. It has a working vacuum cleaner inside, with trash sucked into the screened middle compartment. The end compartment contains a can motor that drives the cleaning disks, and grinding wheels. The other end has a fluid tank and wets the crud before the cleaning wheels grind it off the rail head. The motor is controlled by a DCC chip, and it needs to be hauled by another engine. $165 which is a bit tough, however I am really happy with its operations. Three trips around the loop and already the vacuum had started to fill the hopper.
Its tomorrow..already???
OK to bed and maybe I can get C510 running when I get up..
'nite

 2010 March 29  Monday

Hi All
Last weekend the Murray Railway group hired a mini bus and went to Canberra for the Exhibition.
First time I have been, but it is one of the best Exhibitions I have ever been to.
Much better than Sandown, and Caulfield, and equal to Liverpool as far as this Victorian is concerned.
The club is obviously loaded with happy, interested members, who made everybody welcome, although the different rooms were a bit difficult to find, I thorougfly enjoyed the company and the Exhibition. Thank you our Canberra mates, well done 5 stars!!!

Cheers
Rod.

Addendum/edit/post script :(
Oh and a little bit to add to the C Class sound project. It has been a bit of a failure thus far. The Locomotive moves a few inches ,sound shuts down, restarts, moves etc etc etc.......
With a lot of help from the Loksound forums, we have found that the wiring is the main cause. Although open circuits are brought out by the chemical blackening of the frames and the wheels themselves.
It would seem that those plastic "push on" clips are also used on the bogies, and sub standard wiring does not help.
I have replaced all the plastic "push ons" with solder. Removed the factory single strand wires and replaced them with 32 strand wire, and burnished the wheels clean with a wire wheel on a Dremel.
I have noticed that the bronze wheels get dirty even though the new track appears very clean. I am told that this is caused by oxidisation and I will need to replace the old wheels with the newer silver sets.. chrome? or stainless steel??
Rod 

2010 April 4 Oh Dear!   Sunday

Here is one I have not noticed or heard of before....

I spent some time today speed matching my fleet of A,B and S Class engines.
Whilst I was doing it I tried to work out a clicking noise that had developed in two A Class and one S Class.
Sounded like wheel flats and I checked the wheels and to the naked eye they looked all right. So I checked the gears and found the bogies were all pretty dry. I used teflon grease to lube each locomotive as I got to it, but the noise in the affected engines would not go away.
I decided to write a message here and see if anybody else had seen this annoying problem, and if you knew what it was.However....

I continued on and speed matched all 20 locomotives that I have on the layout. Later on as I was demonstrating things to my son and grandson, an engine that was not affected stalled in a difficult place, and as it was a long train, I grabbed the rear vehicle and gently pulled the stalled locomotive back out and found it was now able to run. I started to drive forward again to see if I could find the dead section, this time the train continued through the section, however the dreaded wheel flat sound was now coming from this locomotive. I removed the wheel sets and this is what I found....

 All 12 wheels were marked the same and it was obviously caused by dragging the engine backwards out of the section. Prototypically correct or not, this is not the greatest discovery I have made with these engines.
I now have checked the Trainorama S Class and the wheels a similarly marked. (Interesting as they come from a different factory)

None of my Austrains wheels have been damaged, although the early 80 Class and C Class wheels are very poor quality, and need constant cleaning. They oxidise easily and heavy cleaning of the blackened wheels seems to make things worse after oxidisation appears over night.

For those of you who double head these locomotives, make sure they are speed matched, I am pretty certain mixing B class and S Class seems to have caused one to drag the other in places and might be a reason for the flats? Definitely do not pull the stalled trains any distance B67 was damaged in only a little more than 4 meters.
Cheers
Rod

 2010 April 6  Tuesday



Just so ToR don't feel like they are missing out
Here are a couple of pictures that suggests that perhaps the factories are not quite so separate as they claim.
I find little difference between the wheels on both S and B Class bogies, apart from the obvious gearing.

 These wheels are straight out of the engine, un cleaned. The previous pics of the Auscision B had been heavily cleaned with a dremmel and wire brush, before I saw the flats in the tread surface

You can see the definite flat line on the edge of the flat.
To the best of my knowledge this Loco has never been dragged, unless it happened when double heading.
I do tend to double head a lot.
I have only been running trains for a few weeks. Not exactly true...
I ran two Y Class, the Garratt and a 35 class as well as a T Class and an X Class for a few months.
This is not round and round in a circle. It is a short run about 7m long around a loop back into the station, and a 10m run into a dead end yard. The engines are run around here, and a Y Class usually remakes up the train. The S Class gets a B Class on front and next run it will end up as a Double header to make things more interesting.

Now what causes the flats? This engine has lived on my work bench for a month or two. It has had limited running as I tried to fit a Loksound decoder to it. The flats were heard about two days after the engine was put into service, with no more than 3 hours actual running (more likely about 30 minutes as it takes only 4 minutes to do the circuit)
I believe the material used in the wheels is very soft. I would think that stainless steel is a much better medium than blackened brass, or nickel silver, or whatever is being used here.

Thanks Bob (B.B.B) for checking this out for us, as I think it might haunt us in the future as engines start getting a run.
Still nobody else reporting these problems?
I wonder if most of the people here are collectors rather than operators too?? I guess I cannot believe I am doing anything much different than others here. At Collingwood I watched people dragging engines backwards and forwards making sure they were on the rails, which is not much different to what I am doing, apart from one case where I pulled a train out backwards, after a stall. Another thing I see done on the club layout many times.

Cheers
Rod

 2010 April  16 another Friday ;)
 Seems like things are standing still. And I am running trains too much. Should be getting on with it  
Completed the track work in the yard and stated wiring it up. One thing about running trains, is that you can discover new problems, before it gets too difficult to fix things up, I guess.
Have had derailments causing a short... everything stops!
So I looked at what I had done, and discovered that each individual track section was not completely isolated.
To do this properly I have to run an extra wire for each track in a yard, and along each single line section that taps into the feed wire, once via a 21 watt 12 volt automotive globe. First I must lift up the track at the points and ensure every yard track and every single line is fully insulated from the tracks either side.
 Now join all the droppers for each individual section to the new third wire appropriate for that section.
Now I am no electrician, but it seems that when a short happens on a section protected by a bulb, the bulb lights up brightly, but every other train on the rest of the track keeps running... Nice one!!
The droppers and the extra lines are in place,the insulators installed and now its only a matter of connecting them all up.
The other work has been inside on the work bench, where I am getting some extra T and X Class converted to DCC and working out my next sound installations.
Maybe more to show next week
Cheers
Rod

 2010 April 18  Sunday


Nice little program  

Keep track of your trains

Might have to buy it so I can answer David's question... What have you got?   oh wait a minute.... ;)

Cheers
Rod