Making electricity flow!

 I have needed to sort this out for years!

My rather poor excuse for making electricity flow from the DCC controller onto my USA switching layout. A sort through the WMD Stores revealed a number of phono plugs and one socket - perfect. If you are not aware phono plugs and sockets are generally used to connect speakers to an amplifier and are perfect for low voltages.

Using the wires supplied with the layout that electrically join the two baseboards, I spliced in a phono plug.

Then the socket was wired and soldered up.

The wires were also screwed into the DCC controller plug.

With it all plugged together this is what it looks like. Certainly a lot more robust and worthy of its job than my previous effort!

The greta thing is that I can now make a similar set up for Chalkdon my 009 narrow gauge layout where this controller will also be used. All I need to do is unplug the USA switching layout wires and move the controller over to Chalkdon. No more twisting wires together or using various clamps to try to make electricity flow!

The finished unplanned project!

My unintended and unplanned freight car weathering project is finally finished. I will let the pictures taken on my USA switching layout speak for themselves! Lets just say I am pleased!

Miniture Engineering.

A strange day at the Rocks By Rail Museum as when I arrived the gates were locked and a volunteer was waiting to get in. To cut a long story short I had to hunt down a set of keys from a local volunteer and open the place up. Now I knew Richard was into all things steam but I was amazed at what he is building in his garage at home.

This is a quarter scale miniature traction engine which is getting to the point of being finished and being able to be steamed! Strange what you find out about people in the strangest of circumstances! I await the finished engine which may hopefully be on the road next year.

Meanwhile, back at the Museum, with keys in hand I was able to get us into the place and open up to our visitors of which there were a few. I carried on with my usual mower mayhem but to be honest it is beginning to look good on the vegetational front. You can almost see stripes in that grass!

The unusual planters are also looking good!

Whilst things that we want to grow are doing well, the weed killing treatment on the track a few weeks ago has cleaned up the track bed nicely.

On future projects, this has been dug out of storage ready to be worked on! That will be fun to paint!

And as I left the Museum, locked up, to return the borrowed keys this went pass the entrance. Lovely to see and no doubt a much slower pace of life. Put that and the miniature traction engine on the road at the same time and you could think you had gone back in time a hundred years!

Why at the hottest times?

Why I always seem to choose the hottest of weeks to start on a major physical project is a question that I cannot answer but it always seems to happen! At the moment I am building a monster of a log store for WMD HQ. Now I understand whilst I refer to it as a monster to some others who have large log storage requirements it may be seen as just a piffling small store but it is double the size of my present one, which at 20 plus years old is about to collapse! I also have piles of logs and timber for burning all over the place so hopefully it will all be able to be gathered in this store and kept dry.

Anyway, on the basis that I will use what I have, much of the stock of timber that I saved from other projects has gone into this one. The photo below shows the base which is 4 x 2 inch timber salvaged from the shuttering to the base of my Man Cave. I knew it would come in useful and with the price of timber these days its saved enough to be not so guilty about that next train!

Being such a large and dense timber there is some weight in that base!

This is where it is going but as you can see this has become the WMD building materials and scrap storage area.

After a clean up it looks better!

Having nearly dehydrated from carrying the base around, it is in place!

To stop the possibility of rot from damp, I raised the base on five of these old cut down fence posts. And to try to stop those rotting I have put a layer of roofing felt on the side that lays on the concrete slabs.

With those in place it was time to attach the uprights and then the preconstructed top which was not easy to lift in place!

With the top fastened in place I could fully appreciate the size of this!  Still much to do like sides, back ,floor and roof but I think I have dealt with the most physical parts now!

I wont be able to do any more until next week probably but hopefully it might be a bit cooler by then!

A change of plan!

In the unplanned weathering of the freight car I had sprayed the underside of the body grey. Having researched actual freight cars further I think it is probably better in yellow so it got resprayed!

Then to match the rest of the weathering on the body of the freight car my method of brown dilute paint washes was applied.

 It still needs more weathering but it is showing promising signs unless I change my plans again!

This freight car project has ballooned!

This freight car project has ballooned which is an excuse to include this picture from my early morning bike ride before it got to hot of the first hot air balloon that I have seen this year.

The freight car project has taken on a life of its own! From the simple planned repair of a coupling to the unplanned (that is not unusual for me as Mrs. Woody will vouch) complete weathering of the freight car!

This is how the body looked in bright yellow.

Using a wide soft brush I just streaked dilute brown paint over the body sides.

Luckily with the hot weather the paint soon dried so it was possible to apply a number of coats. This is what it looked like after four coats. 

I'm pleased with that! Next the underside!

Wagon or freight car?

The fixing of the wagon or in American terms, freight car (never sure how to refer to it in the UK but I guess freight car is probably the more appropriate term) coupling has grown into a bigger job! This is almost always the case with one of my projects! I found some damage to the body moulding with the ladders at one end crumpled

and a missing step at the other end indicated by the red arrow.

Some carful gluing and clamping got the crumpled steps back to shape.

And some plastic strip formed a new step that just needs cleaning up and painting.

Whilst in bits I painted the underside in grey. Not sure if this is the case in real life as the photos of real freight wagons show various paint schemes. It should be a good base to weathering though!

Wagon coupling repair descends into something else!

It was going to be a quick put the coupler back and glue the retaining plate in place on one of the wagons off my USA switching layout. As part of that repair I had to remove the bogie and wheels which was held in place with a push in pin.

With the bogie removed this was the descent into something else! I decided to clean the wheels.

At that point I thought that it might be interesting to try weathering the wheels and bogies. So off came the other bogie and the wheels were removed.

The faces of the wheels were painted in a earth brown colour which is a good base for rust coloured weathering powders. The bogies were painted with the earth brown around areas that would rust and the rest of the bogies were coated in a grey weathering powder followed by some rust powder.

With all that done everything was matt varnished. 

The previous black plastic sheen to the bogies and wheels had gone and they looked a lot more realistic.

Unfortunately I now need to waether the rest of the wagon to harmonise with the running gear!

A different type of controller.

The controller I am talking about is of course for model railways and whilst normally you either have an analogue, or DC controller or a DCC controller, this particular one combines the two functions. That is unusual. It was designed for those users where they perhaps have a mixed fleet of Dc and DCC locos and want one controller only. Whilst you cannot run DC and DCC at the same time you can split your fleet into DC and DCC and operate them separately but only needing the one controller.

I actually bought this about a year ago but have only just got round to trying it out as I uncovered it during my reorganisation of the Man Cave works recently. I thought that I really ought to give it a go! 

Having used the Bachmann and Gaugemaster controllers previously, this new one is taking a bit of getting used to.as the principals behind the selection of DCC locos, speed and functions is very different. It does run both DC and DCC locos as it claims so that works. As you may tell I am not sure of it yet but I will have a bit more of a play with it and see if it eventually works for me.

There are three main parts - the transformer (not in photo), the power selector box (on the right) and the controller (on the left). They are all small and the controller fits in your hand easily enough and I do actually like the rotary speed controller.

You have to try different things or you wont know you don't like them as Mrs. Woody always tells me! I am not sure how well my argument that I bought this just to try it will work with her though!

Thinking you are going to do one thing and end up doing another!

Yesterday I spent the day at the Rocks By Rail Museum. My thinking was that a final push on a couple of still wild like grass areas with the mower would see the site returned to looking well kept rather than jungle like! Having got the mower out and ready to set off where mowers had not been for some time I got a call from Andy. He had come in to clear a valve in one of the steam locos but his day was about to go from planned to unplanned! He asked me if I could give him a hand as the toilets were blocked! Now in a place like the Museum where we are all volunteers you have to accept that on occasions there will be some less than pleasant jobs to be undertaken but they have to be done.

Without going into a blow by blow account of the issues, we had to take two of the toilets completely out which was not the easiest job as you can tell from the look on Andy's face!  

The cause of the blockages? 

Two of the rim cleaners that puts a dose of cleaner into the water each time the toilet is flushed were in the outlet pipe blocking everything being flushed! How they got there - possibly youngsters? Who knows? Nice! Anyway we don't use those cleaners anymore so hopefully that is the end to the problem. With everything cleared it was time to replace everything and get on with our original plans!

Andy got on with the valve.

I have no idea what it does but no doubt something important!

I got on with mowing - nice and quiet down on the nature trail!

And as we were leaving for the day so was our last guest who had come in a very rare Vauxhall Chevette HS of 1978 vintage. Not seen one of these for years but when it came out it was a wolf in sheep's clothing as it has a 2.3 slant 4 cylinder engine under the bonnet!

Great to see this still on the road!