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???