Happy 2023!

 G'day and happy New Year!

I'll be honest, despite my best intentions, not much work has happened on the layout. Today I thought I'd do something small and quick. By the time I moved the stock away from where I was about to work, time started to disappear.

I need to clear some space in the train room. I have a stack of boxes with buildings in them but nowhere on the layout to put them. A quick trip to Bunnings bought me the timber that I needed for the very top level. Before I add the timber, I need to paint and ballast the track. That was today's job. 

I painted the track leading into the covered sections and then I stared on a whole lot more. I couldn't do all of it as the air compressor was starting to get hot but I got enough to do the ballasting that I needed to do. Now I just need to wait until that is dry to put the top on.

It's not an interesting image but here is some of today's painting efforts.

Tomorrow's plan is much the same as today's.

Until next time.

Operations Part 2 Some Paperwork

I'm an operator. My trains need some sort of purpose. Wagons moving on the layout need to have a reason to be there. Even as a teenager with my British trains, I had some sort of paperwork. These were simple cards with the wagon name and number and a fictional destination. Most destinations were off the layout. 

When I started modelling NSW trains something similar was used. I also rolled a dice so that there was some randomness to how many wagons I needed for certain industries. I didn't have car card boxes but wooden pegs blu-taced (I'm sure that's a word) to the layout to hold my small cards, handwritten on small steel blue bits of cardboard that I have scrounged from somewhere. The ideas came from several articles from the Australian Model Railway Magazine over the years.

I can handle trains wandering aimlessly around the layout - it is sometimes truly blissful.

But... shunting is just plain fun.

I've built a couple of layouts with Inglenook shunting puzzles in them. So that I knew what to put where, I created some shunting lists. I still have them somewhere and when I needed to change from bogie wagons to four wheel wagons, it was a simple process.

For the last few layouts I have been using car cards and way bills. The waybills have been getting simpler and more user friendly over the years as I have guests operating the layouts. The car cards clipped together becomes the crew's paperwork.

I've considered 'switch lists' for the crews to fill out and created my own version of an X2010 form used by real train crews. I found an image online to help me out and it was put together using Word. I print it on A5 paper for small clipboards. Here it is:

I have found this useful when running by myself as I don't have to juggle cards. I showed this to one of my operators who thought that it would be good.

Then I found out about JMRI Operations Pro. I subscribe to trains.com, which about a week ago posted a video about using Operations Pro. It's part of the JMRI package which I download with Decoder Pro. I didn't know that I already had it. I followed the tutorial on trains.com and that got me started.

I spoke to the same operator about how marvellous this program is and that it would get rid of car cards. He seemed a little hesitant.

I entered in my container wagons. I have recently reduced them to 15 from 23 or more. In the last post I wrote about the GME wagons on a dedicated pathway from the harbour to the container depot and back again. I haven't quite worked out how to make that happen. I have however worked out how to take 9 wagons from Boydtown Yard to Junction Yard and then only 6 to Billabong Marina.

I had a lot of help from SoCal Scale Models on YouTube. Check out his video here and then subscribe to his channel. He will explain it better than I will here.

The trick is all about "movements". I had 9 wagons entering the yard from two trains. The default number of movements is 5, which means 5 wagons will be added to the train. I was getting four left behind every time. Once that was fixed, I wanted to park them all at Junction Yard and pick up the six already there. I need 9 movements to drop off and 6 movements to pick up. I can now take 9 wagons to Junction Yard but JMRI has me consistently dropping 5 and picking up 2. I still leave for Billabong Marina with 6 container wagons and need 6 movements to set out all the wagons.

It's the reverse on the way back. Something that I have found interesting is that out of the 15 wagons, only 11 or 12 are used for each journey. On one return journey, one lonely ICX wagon didn't move at all.

This is what the operator gets:

The crew receive their manifest for the job. The train is T005. T is for Trip working. 005 is the fifth trip working on the line. It is an odd number as travelling from Billabong Marina to Boydtown is in a down direction from Sydney. The train to the port is T004. It may be renumbered later when schedules are sorted out. I had to come up with a numbering system based on the real thing.

The crew assemble the train leave with all six wagons.

When they get to Junction Yard, they drop off 2 and pick up 5. Not all of the wagons in the yard are leaving but we leave with 9 wagons for Boydtown Yard. In theory, four will leave for Canberra and five will leave for Melbourne. I think it may depend on which order they are built.

When a train arrives and has been shunted, the train needs to be terminated in JMRI and the wagon locations are stored in the software and ready to be built into a new train.

While it isn't what I had planned, there is some sense of randomness about which wagons are used. I makes it a little more interesting.

At the moment, there are only 9 cars in the yard so everything is working well. Hopefully I'll add some more cars this week.

Until next time.

Operations Part 1

I don't know how many parts there are going to be in this. So let's start with part one. I'm sure that it'll be interrupted by other topics.

So... Covid finally got me. The next day after my last post and it laid me up for a couple of weeks. I seem to have recovered well, except for the time lost from work. In my line of work, at this time of year, there are deadlines which I have to meet. I'm going to need to burn a bit of midnight oil to catch up. At the same time, I've got to help my parents move out of their house. It'll all be over by Christmas but in the meantime, I'll be busy.

This means I'm going to need a bit of time set aside to wind down. If you've followed my blog on Billabong Marina, you may have come across my 15 minute a day philosophy. If not, check it out here. I have to confess, that I don't always stick to it and sometimes my 15 minutes is spent on other hobbies. But when life gets busy, I always fall back on it.

What's this got to do with operations? Just before I got sick, I nutted out some ideas.

First up, I use car cards and waybills. This means that I need to make a whole heap of boxes - one for each industry and siding. Done. I even painted them according to the colours used on my waybills. I colour code the destinations for different sections on my layout. I got the idea from the Willow Creek Railroad. It's worth clicking on the link.

Next I had to plan and write up my waybills. I put a lot of effort in making sure that every wagon goes to the right place and all the sidings are shunted with the right number of wagons. I've seen other layouts and they have a one in one out policy. If you put a cement wagon in, you pull one cement wagon out, even if there are two in the siding. I have worked my waybills out this way.

I also have the idea that every morning four trains arrives from Sydney, Canberra, Melbourne and Bega. The last is a pick up goods. Don't forget that my layout is fictitious and that I have dumped enough people to populate a small city where there is currently nothing but bush.

These trains arrive in Boydtown Yard and get sorted onto different trains. Trip trains take the wagons to their destinations, swap them over and return to Boydtown Yard for the wagons to be re-marshalled into the trains for the four off layout destinations. These trains leave for staging and the session is over. This did happen a couple of times with the old layout.

Right before my Covid stint, I did start messing about with this. I have to say it is a lot of fun. I made sure that all of the car cards were sorted correctly into the right boxes. However, while chatting to a mate, who gave the layout the once over on a visit, came the suggestion that the layout was overstocked. He's not wrong.

Here's one example. The fish siding at the new Billabong Marina takes four refrigerated vans. The fish is loaded for overnight delivery to Canberra and Sydney they are swapped over near the end of an operation day with four which have come off the inbound trains earlier in the day.

Is it fair to expect that in the real world, this might not happen? Could the vans of the arriving trains just be taken and deposited in to an empty siding? The folks at the fish siding could spend all day loading them for an evening pick up. This means there are four vans that don't need to be on the layout.

Here is another example. I have 6 Austrains GME container wagons. I love the back story which was on the Austrains website at the time. They were in fixed trains with a guards van at each end and were worked between - I want to say - White Bay where there containers came from the ship to Rozelle Yard where the containers were unloaded. I could be totally wrong. I haven't been able to find the information for a few years. I like the idea and have always kept the wagons together. They work from the new Billabong Marina to the Junction Yard Container Depot.  (One day I should put together a diagram of the layout.) 

When they are picked up from the harbour, they have always been replaced by the same number of wagons. Could they be picked up from the container depot in the morning and be placed wharf side and returned in the evening?

The container depot can hold 12 of this length wagon. Does it need to be full all the time? One thought is that it could hold the 6 GME wagons in the morning. When the trains from staging arrive, containers are taken off and then hauled to Junction Yard. The GMEs are picked up and taken to the harbour. In the evening, the reverse happens.

However, the loco could leave the harbour with nothing but a guards van as there are no wagons to collect. I have now got away from the one in, one out idea with both of these examples.

As I muck about on the layout, I jot down notes as I go. I hope to spend some time this week jotting down more notes. The layout needs a bit of clearing at the moment as somethings were placed in the layout room for somewhere to go. My first job tomorrow with be to tidy up a bit.

I also want to find out more about JMRI Operations Pro. It could be something worth trying.

Let me finish with a photo I took on a trip to the UK before the pandemic. I don't have an image of what I've been writing about and I like a photo in my posts. It's a class 66 with some hopper wagons heading through Leicester 15th January, 2020. 

Until next time.

Not the post I started drafting.

Once again I've found myself with a long time between posts. In fact, I started this post 4 weeks ago and I was going to write all about operations. I even had comments on the last one, which I don't normally get. I might need to start checking more often.

If I thought that first seven weeks had been a bit hectic with Covid and unrelated colds and rearranging the house for the final part of some renovations, the next five were worse - my parents decided to sell their house of 56 years and downsize into a two bedroom retirement place.

There was a lot of stuff to do and pack up.

There are a lot of sad moments in packing up a house. A lot of memories in all of the rooms, a lot of rediscovered treasures from an age gone by, some from people who are no longer with us.

Perhaps, not the saddest moment but sad none the less was watching Dad packing up his trains and taking the layout apart.

It was one of CJ Freezer's plans from "Book of Model Railway Track Plans", called Trent. It went up pretty quickly but like most layouts, it never got finished. It reached its purpose though. It provided Dad with a lot of fun (and sometimes trouble) and gave us something to talk about. He enjoyed running a Garratt with ore wagons around it. Can we ask a layout to do anymore than that?

He also has a smaller, more portable layout designed by Paul Lunn. It's about 900x1200mm and has two docksides linked by a hidden reversing siding. He saw it in a Railway Modeller but it's also in the Peco Setrack OO/HO Plan Book. He loved the idea and built it, along with the Metcalfe buildings the article suggested.

While the layout may not run again in its proper form, the buildings have been passed on to me for my layout. I can't use them all but there is a section yet to be filled in that perhaps, I could put some track to utilise the Metcalfe brewery. It does need some attention with windows which have fallen out.

As for layout for Dad, I'm not sure how much room he'll have, but we're thinking of some ideas.

In the meantime, we went to Asquith station to watch 3801 return to Sydney from Newcastle on Saturday. I headed to Mt Colah this morning to see it again. I'll leave you with the clip.

Until next time.

Let's Poke a Bear

Let's cut to the chase. I'm going to poke the track and wheel cleaning bear.

Here is my track cleaning train. How I got to this train is a bit of a story.

I'll start by saying that track rubbers are not good. They are abrasive. As one modeller once told me, no one will let him clean their car with a track rubber.

However, some of my track is really old and so the 'don't use a track rubber' ship sailed long ago. I use a Fleischmann track rubber and I find that it does the business. I also use a Walthers track rubber on the bottom of one of their track cleaning wagons.

Another fact is that if you regularly use your layout, you need to clean it less. I have found this to be true over the years. Covered tracks also need less cleaning. I once left a small portable layout covered for six months and the track was fantastic. In comparison my main layout left uncovered next to it had grubby tracks.

Back in 2005 when I joined the Gosford City Model Railroad Club, I noticed that they had a couple of modified wagons which had track rubbers attached to a pad underneath them pushed by a loco at the start of every night. One car had a masonite block underneath it with the rougher side to the track. It worked with the same effect. I found a track cleaning car in a local hobby shop and thought that I would give it a go. It's the Union Pacific car.

I had seen another modeller's track cleaning train years ago. He had a Centerline track cleaning car which he had put a body on. These cars are a rectangular slab of brass or metal with rectangular hole in the centre. In that is put a brass cylinder which is covered with a strip of Chux wipes. The Chux is secured with a rubber band. It was doused with isopropyl alcohol and run around the track. Then a new Chux strip was doused with CRC 2-26 (I think). The train was run around the layout and the layout was given a couple days for the CRC 2-26 to work its magic. Then he reckoned that he didn't need to clean it again for six months.

I made similar wagon with an old Trax MHG, I swapped the bogies for some Powerline clip in bogies with metal tyres on the wheels. For the cylinder I used an old 35mm film canister which I cut down and filled with lead sinkers, all held together with Tamiya masking tape. I used an old Lima loco weight to hold it down. It worked. And the above method worked well... the first time.

He has also replaced the Walthers track rubber with a bit of cork to help collect some of the dirt before the roller reached it. So I did the same. It does work well.

The second time I used this treatment there was too much CRC2-26 on the track and I had to wipe it all off.

The track cleaning train was relegated to the off layout shelves until I needed a better solution to hand cleaning the tracks.

With the last layout I needed to employ another track cleaning train. By this stage I had started using the Noch clip on cleaners. They are a little brush of sorts that clip onto an axel of a wagon. They won't clip onto newer Australian models but will to a couple of the older Powerline wheels with metal tyres which are on the old MHG. The Union Pacific wagon was re-employed with the cork pad and I bought another Walthers track cleaning car with the rubber. This time I pulled the body off and put a Casula Hobbies or Silvermaz kit water gin on top. I painted the two Australian wagons yellow to represent the permanent way department. 

Next time I'm down Liverpool way or at an exhibition, I'll probably buy another water gin kit for the original track cleaning car. I'll also buy a roll of HO underlay cork as it fits well on the pad. The cork was originally blu-tacked on and it stayed for quite a time. I replaced the cork and used a UHU glue stick. It worked a treat.

One thing that I have found with these Walthers wagons is that you need to take a spring off one of the screws that hold the pad in place. After a while, turn the wagons around to even the wear.

CRC 2-26 is not good on traction tyres. I have Minimodels suburban sets with traction tyres so I need something else. We also used CRC 2-26 to clean wheels of locos. We'd spray some on a paper towel and place it in the track. Next we would place one bogie on the paper towel and the other on the track, turn the power up and hold the loco in place. We would then turn the loco around and clean the other bogie.

This worked well too and would spread the CRC 2-26 thoughout the layout. However, we had one bloke in the club who hated it. He was German and with his accent he would call CRC 2-26 "Das oily schitt". 

To clean loco wheels he would only use a brass brush to scrub the wheels. Peco produce a wheel cleaner like that. I have two so that I can clean opposite wheels at the same time. They are connected to the track with alligator clips. When hooked up and the power turned up the Peco brushes are applied to the wheels which spin and get cleaned. It works 99% of the time.

However, when I had to clean the wheels on my Southern Rail interurban, the wire brushes weren't as successful. On closer inspection, the insides of the wheels were dirty and the pick ups weren't able to do their job. 

To solve the problem, I spayed some paper towel with some isopropyl alcohol and put the loco on it. I also took the bogie being cleaned and made sure the towel was brushing the inside of the wheels. It made the world of difference.

I put some isopropyl alcohol on the cork and ran the track cleaning train up and down the incline from the terminus. This also made a world of difference but the cork needed replacing. I've got a supply to keep me going for a while.

There are other chemical products out there such as Rail Zip, which I haven't used with success, and Deluxe Track Magic, which I have yet to use. According to UK publication Model Rail the latter works well. I have a mate who swears by it.

Everyone has their own method of cleaning tracks and with the past treatment the track has had, I find that my little train works well.

Until next time.

Happy July

Wow! Just over three months since the last update.

Since then, I have linked the coal mine head shunt to the line from platform one of Bega Station, I have re-aligned the track at the renamed Billabong Marina to fit in the Fine Fish building. I'll need to block off the ends where vans went through on the old layout.

The third thing mentioned from the last blog post was an unloading platform for the coal mine for supplies.  I'm going to need to build the coal tipple first to see if there is enough room.

As for working on the terminus, not much happened. We have some renovations going on and while I was able to get a start on it and adding bits of track with my 15 minute a day philosophy, work was soon halted as stuff needed to go into the train room for temporary storage.

We were meant to be going away last week but someone in our house got COVID. As an aside, we're triple vaxed so for the infected person, things weren't too bad. Dad came down with it too on the same day. It was a coincidence as the the only common factor is me. However, I love that his doctor prescribed him some $1000 antiviral tablets and it cost him less than $6. Mum came down with it a few days later and received an even better deal. I love that we are in a country with health care like that. I'm happy to pay my Medicare levy.

Despite the illness, I looked at the silver linings of the storm clouds that battered the NSW coast for the first week of the month. I didn't have to drive in the hazardous conditions and I could self isolate to the train room. As a close contact (I still am) I don't want to go anywhere and potentially spread something.

The train room needed some cleaning. I'd stacked some stuff where the terminus station was planned. It was convenient to put it there. I had to buy some new points as well. There may have also been some binge watching as a distraction too. However, as of last night, the terminus has been put down and trains can now arrive and depart.

The curved track placed in the foreground is to a planned good yard. There are 6 platforms and a bay siding for unloading parcels vans. In later years, when passenger traffic increased, this was turned into another platform. However, the new platform couldn't be named platform 7 as it was on the opposite side to platform 6. There are a number of station which have a platform 0. Lidcombe is a good example. Why not renumber it platform 1? Apparently, it's a big programming issue. I don't know the ins and outs and I don't really mind that I don't know.

Why put a platform 0 on a new layout with a fictitious station? It is a shorter platform than platform 1 and I like the idea of the more important express trains leaving from platform 1. 

The original idea was for a 4 car suburban train on a DC shuttle from the bay platform as though it was travelling on a different line. However, there isn't enough room on the other end to hide the train. With the shuttle at the back of the layout, there would be less things to interfere and it could be its own little circuit.

With that idea not coming to fruition, it is just another platform for trains on the rest of the layout.

It was pointed out to me by a friend that platform 1 on every Sydney station has trains heading to Central. I think Museum on the City Circle is an exception but trains on both platforms are heading to Central one way or another. Platform 1 is always on the up side of the station. Maybe my platform numbering is totally wrong. I'm not changing it.

There are also no points at the buffers end of the station. That means we need a station shunter. I've a couple of locos that can fill the job. The operator can uncouple the loco at the buffers and at the other end of the station, the shunter can come in and remove the train to the carriage sidings or onto another platform. The loco can then head down the hill for servicing a the loco depot. With the terminus at about 1.4m from the ground, I reckon that some of my operators (including myself) might not be able to reach any points a further 50 cm from the front.

What's next?

Fill the rear window with a a board for a backscene.

Get some timber for the platforms.

Build the coal tipple for the coal mine.

As I'm still a close contact, the tipple might be built tomorrow.

Until next time. 

A long overdue update.

 

Yes... it has been a while. What's been happening? I've just been enjoying the layout and running trains. I've been working on some waybills and car card boxes for operations on the layout because realistically, all of the freight stuff is done. I've learnt some stuff on the way.

Most of the work in the train room has been furniture based. I've got a mould problem. I've wiped down as much of the furniture as I can with vinegar in January and even pained some old shelves. They look pretty good now. But the mould all came back too soon. 

So I replaced the furniture. That helped. As did throwing out the unpainted ply. I was ruthless. Anything that had a hint of green fuzz went out the door. This included some old wooden boxes that I have had for nearly twenty years. One of the victims of this purge was my micro layout Billabong Marina. That had some nice green and yellow fur underneath it.

It might seem extreme but my cavalier attitude to mould in the past has lead to a mould allergy. The long and short of it is that it makes me cough and that is not socially acceptable these days.

Today was spent painting and installing more shelves to replace some old Aldi MDF shelves. The new shelves are very similar but the MDF is nice and white.

But while running trains, what did I learn?

The line from the coal mine is way too short for coal trains being loaded by a flood loader. These trains will block the return loop for the mainline, even if they go the other way than I originally planned. The coal mine head shunt runs along the same line as platform one of Bega station. The line veers right and there is a short stub siding. The plan was to put a signal box in there. Now there will be a new piece of track.

I reckon the coal mine needs a siding for unloading equipment and supplies such as explosives. I could also put a small platform there for workers trains. The old layout had a space for one at the mine.

I figured that if I was putting platforms in then one at the harbour area might work. I could put the Billabong Wharf station building there.

The Fine Fish building from Billabong Marina could fit in the harbour area but some track work is needed for it to fit - and some perspex as the track will be very close to the edge.

However, I reckon that the biggest thing that I have learnt is that it's just plain fun to run trains. That's why we're here in the hobby isn't it?

With the Easter break coming up, I'm hoping to get on with the terminus level and some of it is already in place.

Until next time.