Down the Left Hand side

 The three pieces of the jigsaw puzzle have been moved into the shed to allow assembly. The layout when first assembled in the bedroom was all done in separate baseboards to allow future moving and that is what is now happening.

The previous setup had grades built into it as firstly the boards had to pass around the back of three monitors and then raise up over a server in another corner. It was decided to remove the grades and make it a perfectly flat layout as grades will be provided in the outer shed extension. Also when a Trainorama 32 class was tried it seemed to have trouble hauling a load up a grade in one direction.  So now it should be able to haul a better load.

To achieve a modified track plan and make full use of the room but still retaining the basic plan an additional board was secured to the outside of the existing layout up against the wall. Just one track wide. This will add extra flexibility and eventually be able to run three trains independently. This all had to be done prior to assembling along the wall.

Some new legs had to be made as previously portions of the corner baseboard had shorter legs that were supported on the top of the desk. The initial baseboard had four legs for support and then as other sections were made they were cantilevered off the previous board. This has worked out okay.

The boards were joined together with 1/4" bolts and wingnuts. They have worked out well so far.

The top board that runs across the roller door also has an additional piece of timber added so it can hold to outside track. Also there will be an additional crossover added to give access to the container terminal from the outside track and vice versa.

Fun and games started when I had to start connecting up the baseboards together. The corner section had to be the first section added and the left hand side was to connect around to the station area. The right hand side will eventually connect up with the server baseboard when it is brought down from the house. As can be seen from the photo it was a flimsy setup with one permanent leg in the corner and the two other corners temporarily help up with the use of clamps.

After a bit of a struggle I managed to get the three sections back together. The bolt holes still lined up and once secured the whole structure felt more safe.

The above photo shows the three baseboards finally connected. There is trackage that shows where the extra track will join up to new baseboards to finally go around the rest of the shed. It also shows how the additional track will be joined into the current set up. Today I am happy that this much has been achieved.

The next board to go in will be the 'server board' Next time.

First Steps

 Well finally things are on the move. The first part of the layout has been transferred from the house to the shed to take up its new home. Designed initially as a modular layout, it was easy enough to dismantle and then carried down to the shed.

The layout has inherited the space previously occupied by South Coast Rail, which some of you may have followed over the years. SCR was both a HO and then a Victorian Narrow gauge layout. Both layouts now dismantled and now allowing the space to be occupied by East Coast Rail.

The walls have been freshened up with a new coat of paint when luckily a 3/4 tin was found under the layout. There was a pickle jar saved of leftover paint which will now hopefully be enough to cover the areas that are a bit bare of paint. The floor has been covered with second hand floor tiles that make the floor look more respectable. Many years ago it was just the bare concrete so this is  a vast improvement. The dark grey is a good colour for hiding the dirt.

There are still many 'objects' in the room that need to go somewhere. Hand me down drawers are now filled with such things as scenery items, and other bits and pieces that we all seem to collect over the years. My hope is to eventually get rid of most of the things and then get rid of the drawers. But for the moment we will work around them.

The initial layout was purpose designed to fit in a bedroom and had the usual passenger station, loco depot, turntable and freight yard, enough to make it interesting, but by the decision to move to a larger area, the design will have to modified to make use of the larger space, and why not?

Section 1 arrives

There were three baseboard sections that will join and go down the side of the shed towards the roller door. The second section that contains the turntable has now been joined onto the first section out from the wall to allow easy access to the back so the additional timber and track can be laid. Also additional timber needs to be sourced for more legs. In its previous position the corner section was held up with short legs that rested on top of the desk.

Baseboards 1 & 2 assembled.

The above photo highlights the narrowness of the platform, this was the maximum width I could fit in within the space. It is intended to provide a larger style platform elsewhere on the layout. So for now it will have to do.

More updates later.

Moving along

It has been a while but work has been going on in the background to get the shed ready for the movement of the East Coast Rail layout out of the bedroom. Some readers may had identified that East Coast Rail will be taking over the space previously allocated to the narrow gauge South Coast Rail. Then SCR narrow gauge has been discontinued and in its place South Coast Traction will replace it and occupy a small area of the shed and be surrounded by East Coast Rail. If you can't follow that then I will do some diagrams later on on how the two systems will co-habitate. 

It has been a big job to remove a layout and replace with another one. But there are side benefits in that areas that were previously untouched by a vacuum cleaner have now been done. How often do you pull out all your junk under the layout for spring cleaning? And another great side benefit is that there is so much junk that won't be staying, sometimes garbage night doesn't come around soon enough.

Throughout the shed there are now various piles of similar material that I hope to be able to recycle. The fascia boards, nicely painted in a satin grey were nearly all recovered and are now awaiting to take up their new positions when ready. Then there are other piles of various size timbers also waiting to see where they will end up. It seems like a chess game moving things around down there to their final positions. We kept old bedroom suite and kitchen sets of draws, too good to chuck out and ones no one would want and they are doing a good job sitting under the layout baseboards full of sorted items.

Another task I did was to repaint one end of the shed, with a luckily found leftover tin of blue paint. The big worry was that it wasn't a full tin so I had to select the top sections of the wall (as the baseboards would hide the bottom sections) and then go around again and finish painting the bottom section. I thought I was clever and finished painting with a small amount of paint left over that I put into a small glass jar. Only trouble was the next day when it had all dried the spots I missed were clearly visible. A good suggestion from my son was to declare these spots as clouds. So that's what will happen if I don't get back to it.

I have had a pile of used carpet tiles I purchased a few years ago. It is now time to get them down on the floor and I will start up one end and gradually fill the room with them. I also purchased a long brush with soft bristles. It fits up against the roller door and is supposed to prevent dust from entering. This is yet to be proven. Also I replaced the rubber across the bottom of the door to prevent the dust entering there. Only trouble is either the door is not level or the floor as there is still a gap below, another issue to check out.

During clean up today I came across four Athearn Budd cars that I was going to convert into the 'South Coast Daylight Express'. This never happened but may in the future. So what I have done is to place the cars on the Thomson River bridge for a few pictures. Although the bridge was built in O scale some of the photos are believable even though the HO models will cross it. The bridge has been retained and will be incorporated into the new HO layout.

Here are a few bridge photos and meanwhile I will get on with the cleaning up and sorting out of the shed.

Works for HO???

Times are a changing

 This post will soon re-awake from hibernation and spring back to life, watch this space.

Go the mighty C's

Waiting for their next assignment.

 The long awaited C class have finally been delivered from Auscision and now form part of the backbone of the East Coast Rail fleet. In the above photo they are arranged around the turntable, something like was created by the Streamliners that surrounded the Goulburn turntable some time ago.

The C class are a very popular with the rail fraternity and have a big following. A few years ago they regularly hauled a freight No. 4190 that ran from Sandgate to Botany daily. We were able to view it locally at Cowan where up to four C class would head into the Up Relief to await a passenger service to pass. The C's dropped down into low idle and this sound was what made them likeable. Luckily they headed towards Sydney around midday and after following them towards Sydney for a while then we headed home for lunch.

A few other things have been happening around the layout, a passenger platform has been built, so I will cover that in the next update.

Diesel House (2)

 The diesel shed has been basically finished. It has been a composition of bits and pieces, a custom job to fit the space. The overall size is not large and will only fit around four smaller main line type locos such as the 44 class locomotives. There is not enough space to devote to a larger shed as this area has to also accommodate a turntable and storage around it.

The shed roof which was made from a station platform kit had to be cut down to size. The shed roof didn't have any ends with it so I fabricated ends using plain styrene and glued on some strip styrene as extra support. Evergreen angle came in handy to cover the edges from the roof to the ends. Originally the end of the kit was three tracks wide and had to be modified back to two tracks wide. It may not be a prototypical building but I think it looks the part, especially when everything around it gets completed.

Along each side at the bottom of the sides I glued a length of styrene, to give some rigidity and it also represented a concrete base to the building.

The whole building was sprayed with a grey paint which was needed to colour up the various pieces of white styrene inside the shed. Once that was done the building was given some weathering using Tamiya khaki drab diluted down with plenty of isopryl alcohol. It is better to make the first paint well diluted and then build up with later coats.

Two sections of fencing were painted white and glued outside the door entrances as a measure to prevent employees going directly onto the running track. Clearances are very tight at this spot.

So the basics of the shed are done, there is still some more enhancing such as some lights over the doorways and internal detailing. I am planning on building an elevated platform between the two roads inside the shed, another day.

Diesel House

 Amongst the many projects there are to do is the need for a diesel loco shed. This will be situated on the left hand side of the room and sit mid way down in the loco area. Room for the shed is tight and it will sit against the main line track that is next to the passenger platform.

Location of diesel shed

Pictures of diesel sheds were hard to find, so the best compromise was to just freelance the shed to look like one. While trawling through Ebay one day I came across a shed that had potential. It was reasonably cheap and one of those items 'postage free' from China. (If only items from the states were as cheap!) The kit had the usual four walls, a flat roof and floor. There were sprues that fitted suitable equivalent holes to make it all rigid. In the end none of these were used.

As other things with the layout progressed the loco shed project was put aside. Then I got the package with the parts out again. There were no instructions or photos, just the parts in a plastic bag. I was fairly straight forward anyway. I did a dry run with the parts on the layout and quickly realised that what I had on hand would only make half a shed, so another kit was ordered and turned up some time later.

So when it was time to get serious the parts were taken out of their respective bags and one seemed smaller than the other. The penny quickly dropped and I realised either I was sent an N scale kit or I had ticked the wrong box when ordering. A period of many months had elapsed and although I could have re-ordered a second HO kit I felt that using the N scale one, some interesting mods would have to be made. The other issue was that the windows would be smaller, but side by side they seemed to work out Okay.

Ex station roof

The hunt was on for a suitable roof. Worse case scenario was to manufacture a flat roof which should have been easy to make. But a visit to the Forestville Model rail exhibition led me straight to the second hand section. Getting in there on a Saturday meant a slow trip into the narrow room to look for bargains. At times you couldn't even see the tables due to a wall of bodies doing the same bargain hunting. Way down the back of the room was where there was some sort of order and the 'other than locos and rolling stock' section was. As it was two hours in after opening I didn't expect to see much suitable but then I spotted some type of european station roofing complete with the supports. When you are into scratch building you have to quickly determine if you can do something with it. So with this item I could see that the roof looked a good possibility. The were skylights in the roof which would let light into the shed. Maybe this style wouldn't work in real life but I thought it would work for me. Can't complain, it only cost $10 for the station roof.

The shed is fairly small being 400m long and 125mm wide. This covered two tracks and will provide coverage for four locos around the size of 44, 45 etc style locos. It would not give coverage for two NR type locos completely on the same track. The design is mainly to give the appearance of infrastructure to house a few locos. I am not sure what will be provided inside the shed at this stage. To match the size of the shed I had to cut down the length and width of the platform roofing. It sorta came out OK. To fit the walls onto the roof section I glued an L angle evergreen strip along the base of the roof. This also formed a gutter and tidied up the edging and made it look a lot neater. This can be seen in the roof photo above. Naturally a second section had to be added as the sections out of the bag are not long enough.

Whoops N scale

The above photo shows how the N scale sections were infilled with HO scale corrugated section to match the height of the correct HO sections. I think it gives some variety to the shed. The kit for the shed was actually for three tracks wide but the front had to be modified in width to only cover two tracks. The other issue was that the doorways had to be enlarged to HO scale.

Loco shed in its selected place.

Something missing?

The above photos shows the basics of the shed. It just requires the back section added and some more detailing, painting, weathering etc. I'll show that on the next blog update.