2023_06_10 Its just plain too cold and wet!
And so THURSDAY....
Despite all the excuses we have actually squared away a few things. Electrically the railway actually seems to be working with every track now working well on DCC.
Honeysuckle was repaired by Tony K (who donated it to the cause.) Wired it up,got the points working and temporary controls installed. Tony is building a new lever frame for this station, as we had to re-configure it as a through junction rather than a terminus, in its original form. Tony has already built all the operating semaphore signals, and they are stored away until the scenery and ballast are fixed up and the new lever frame arrives.
Last Thursday Al and I had our regular workday and we moved on to some dodgy track work on the branch line. We had already spent a lot of time trying to resurrect the old hand laid track. And so decided to replace the three way points with a peco code 75 asymmetric three way point that almost matched the original. Almost is the operative word. But it certainly improved operations at Trentham.
Some pictures.
The Peco point did not actually fully match the footprint of the original hand made point.
However Al worked his magic! and it fixed down (despite the caneite base) and will tidy nicely, I think.
All went well .I laid on my trolly under the points and fixed the point motors in place and wired the three way point in. Then I had to replace the points into the dock road. It was late and I struggled to get the throw rod into the throw bar. Pushed too hard and broke the damn thing. It was a code 70 microscale point, and I could not drill out the hole on the throwbar because it was too flimsy....
So I now have to fix it up before Al comes again. He was disappointed with me, I am sure :(
FRIDAY...............
Graeme gave me a call, and said he was in the mood to do some painting!
And so he did (some painting)
Graeme saw the buckled valence for the first time. We decided the best fix (for us) was to triple the number of rivets and force the buckles as flat as we could. The results were good enough, I guess.
Graeme then painted the valence mat black.
Obviously he was not yet "painted out" and we did find some 6 year old costeau blue paint in a leaky tin and we watered it down to get just enough paint for the job.
And so onwards and forwards the trusty roller headed away, back to the other end again.
We can now see an end to the project we started last year to hide the bricks.
And so with the backdrops painted and the valence in place our next projects are staring us in the face. Graeme gets to start his scenery, and I get to install the LED lighting. (and fix up some existing adhesion problems as well with the existing LED strips
Just a day after painting, and looking great.
Cheers
Rod.
