September Update

             

A quieter month activities have included Scenery, Consisting, Ops Session, Planning for Peter J's and Spacky's layouts, Tasks Completed & Scheduled.

Onka Valley Scenery

The bottle of Realistic Water has arrived and the top pourings have been completed.

Throttle Consisting

My coal train has double headed steam locos and with the new operating sessions they don't just travel through the layout and arrive at the loco depot.  They are required to be serviced so must be de-consisted and individually turned on the turntable service then reconsisted for the ongoing journey.

I have prepared an instruction card to help/remind operators of the correct methods.

My Ops Sessions

I scheduled two sessions this month as I will be away for a while next month.  The goal for this year was to complete the full 8 sessions making up the full cycle of sessions for the very first time. 

4th September

Barry, Chris, Dennis, Des, Don, John & Wayne joined me and we had fun.  Unfortunately Ross came down sick and missed out so I was one operator down but the new schedule has one "severable operator position" based on my previous experieces.

There were a few issues as this was the first time session 6 has ever run.  F7B in the middle of a consist died, a couple of ommissions on the Hornetown arrival/departures checklist at Hornertown, I forgot to "cycle the waybills" on the staged Express Goods so the cars in the consist did not have their "next destination" updated so were destimed to go back to where they came from - this overloaded the classification track causing aome unforseens problems.  I will sort "the mess out" before the next session.

Wayne & Dennis at Hornertown

Don & Chris at Jimtown

John running the express goods while Barry has a rest

Chris and Barry watching Hornertown movements

Don & Des chatting to Wayne

John running the Flinston Local

Des in the crew room between assignments

Barry in the crew room between assignments

The session finished on time and afterwards we enjoyed afternoon tea.

18th September

Unfortunately due to sickness and other commitments we did not have enough operators so the session was cancelled the day before.

So I won't acieve my goal of running all 8 sessions this year - oh well...

Ops Sessions at Wayne's

I was a reserve for the first session Wednesday 9th bt Due to sickness the session was cancelled. The second session scheduled for Thurday 27th and it suffered the same fate as the 9th.

Modeling Session at Peter S's

Due to Family matters I was unable to make it - Sorry Peter.

Planning for Peter J

Peter came to visit in lieu of my second cancelled Ops Session and we discussed what Don & I had come up with.  I presented him with a folder containg a printed version of all the planning.  He stayed for around 3 hours during which time I setup a speadsheet for waybill production which he has subsequently filled out in a Shared Dropbox folder and I used mail merge to produce a print file and Peter did the rest.

We further refined the Job Cards for the Yardmasters and did some minor updates to the Train Graphs.

Peter has constructed and installed the Car Card Boxes for the various locations.

The plan is to run Session 1 for the first time on 9th October. 

Planning for Spacky

Spacky came to visit ans stayed over for a night and we managed to start to document what he wants from his new layout which he hopes to commence in his new trainroom which is currently under construction,

He is constructing a space of approximately 9.5 metres by 9.0 metres.

I played around with the space and provided him with an idea to consider.

Botton Level

Top Level

Now I wait for Spacky to do some "doodling" on possible track configurations - He may scrap what I suggested too!

Tasks Completed in last 30 days 

Here is the new report without any duplicat entries from the previous month.  The biggest job was track cleaning and re-applying the CRC 2-26 on all mainlines, branch lines and yards which I did over two days.

Scheduled Tasks for next 90 days

That's it for now so until next time.....

-ooOOOoo-