Sunday, July 20, 2014

Video tour

In June last year I made a video tour of the layout that you can watch here. It is sometimes easy to feel like that I am not getting much done on the layout. When I watch last years video I realise that in the past twelve months I have gotten quite a bit of work done on the layout.

To give you an idea of what I have achieved this last year I have made another video tour.

 

 
Please forgive the shaky video as I shot it with my iPad. I hope you enjoy it and thanks for watching

Thursday, July 17, 2014

July update

While I haven't been updating the blog I have been working on the layout. After my last post about simplifying the railway I have been making a few small changes.

I have moved the dairy coop building to the interchange town as I think it looks better there and was probably too substantial a building for the small town it was serving. I haven't bedded it in yet so the move may not be permanent. You may notice I am not using town names. The coop has a Geehi sign mounted on it that I don't want to remove so the town names are now also undecided.

In the spirit of making things simpler the town formally known as Geehi has been made smaller.
the shortened yard. The yard used to end in front of the loco.
 
It originally had a very long yard, longer than the run to the next station down the line. I was also not that happy with track between it and the next town as it came out of the yard and almost instantly went into a curve that only ended at the next town. I shortened the yard by about 6 feet and moved the whole town by the same amount to the left. It doesn't sound much but it gives me an extra train length between the two towns which looks a lot better. It also gave me the opportunity to add some winding curves that add to the look of a small narrow gauge railway.
 
 
It was a simple change as the yard was laid on a single board. All I had to do was remove the track at one end cut a couple of wires and shorten the board. I had to remove a couple of point throw machines and all in all it only took a day to do. I spent last weekend relaying the track & repairing the wiring and everything was going great until I went to reinstall the point throws. I have managed to put a point over a non moveable piece of the frame! Doh! It is only in the wrong spot by 10 mm but its still the wrong spot. I have been scratching my head since pondering what I will do. I am still undecided but it does reinforce the adage check at least twice before you lock yourself in.