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-

August Update

            

A quieter month activities have included Scenery, Staging Names, Ops Planning for Peter J's and Barry's layouts, Tasks Completed in last 30 days & Scheduled Tasks for next 90 days.

Onka Valley Scenery

I will need to do one more "thin pour" to get the final water level I am aiming for.  I ordered some more Woodland Scenics Realistic Water from Amazon and after it not being despatched for over 3 weeks I cancelled the order and placed with another supplier albeit at 20% increased cost!

Centennial Mills Roof

Peter J and I have been working on Centennial Mills which was built about 10 years ago.  We found that the glue fixing some of the front sections had given way and they were starting to curl away.  So we reglued them and clamped until set.

Scratch Built Water Tank

We decided that there should be a water tank on the roof so I set about scratch building one

Roof Access Stairways

We have decided to have one at each end and two positioned in front of (to hide) the finger lift holes required to remove the roof if necessary down the track.

Template used to mark out

Eight sections cut using No, 11 blade

0.1 x 0.1 framing added to side and bottom edges

Over the last decade I have built roof details and stored them for later use. Peter has weather a number of then we can use on various building roofs.

I am having a go at some too...

Staging Names

I have found that I always have to look at the labels on the car card boxes to relate track number to name.   I finally decided to put the names on the control panel.

My Ops Session on 3rd

Barry, Dennis, Don, John, Peter J, Peter S & Wayne joined me.

Many operators undertook new roles but prformed well.  We all had some fun and some said they thought it was the best operating session we have ever had.

Thanks to Peter J who took some photos

L>R Me, Dennis, Peter s, John, Barry, Wayne & Don

Don & Barry Shunting Flintston

John shunting Huntington

Wayne & Dennis undertaking the YardMaster roles at Hornertown

Me checking the running sheets

Peter S running the loaded ore train

We had a little hiccup

We had the obligatory afternoon tea

L>R Peter J, Dennis, Don, Peter S, John, Wayne & Barry

Ops Sessions at Wayne's

I was invited to and attended one session and was a reserve for the second session this month.

Wednesday 9th

I joined Don, Hugh, John and Ross with our host Wayne and we had a great Ops Session even if one solenoid went up in smoke despite an inline CD Unit!  It even took out the secondary winding of the feed transformer.  So manual operation of affected turnouts resulted.

Wayne, John, Hugh, Ross & Don

Wayne giving an explanation to Don & Hugh during Crib

John & Hugh at Lowood Crossing

Ross at Troubridge Point

Don at Waverly

John at Lowood Crossing

Hugh at Dunkleigh Towers

Hugh Shunting the "SCT" at Forrest Gully

Wayne and Don at Dunkleigh Towers

I forgot to get a photo at afternoon tea....

Here is a short video

Thursday 27th

Don, Peter S, Wayne, Dennis, Des & Ross attended the session and thanks to Don for the photos and basis of the commentary below. 

L>R Peter S, Wayne, Dennis, Des & Ross

L>R Peter S, Wayne, Dennis, Des & Don

Des at Lowood Crossing

Dennis & Peter S at Eden Park

Wayne roving keeping an eye on everyone

About halfway through the session a complete power failure occurred on Lowood zone area, Wayne went looking but couldn't find the source of the problem.

Wayne head down doing a restart, didn't work. 

Lowood panel - dead!

Wayne checking points, controllers didn't show 'Short" screen was normal.

So it was an early stop Session abandoned so into afternoon tea.

PS  I spoke to Wayne later in the week and it looks like the Booster serving the area has died....

Ops Session at Ross's

I was invited to attend a session this month but unfortunately I was "off colour" and missed out.  Ross sent me a couple of photos...

Barry Rosslyn & Chris "intently operating"

Barry busy at Adelaide

Planning for Peter J

Following things not going to plan at the last ops session Peter asked me for assistance with his planning.  While he is away on holiday I met with Don as he has operated Cedar Junction and I have only operated Grass Valley - the main yards - to white board our ideas on trains to run.

Track Plan

Results of our discussions

I detailed the mainline track sections

The jobs were established from the whiteboard data

Each Job was detailed - here is an example

Then the train graphs for Sessions 1 and 2 were developed

Then I prepared the Job Cards

When Peter gets home we need to meet to go through what has been developed and then decide if he wants to amend his JMRI Ops program that produces his shunt lists or introduce Waybills,

Planning for Barry

Barry has started some serious thinking about how to operate his planned layout.  I took him through a similar process to what I used for Peter J.

The track plans

I detailed the mainline track sections

Then I developed the trains based on what Barry described

Each Job was detailed - here is an example

Barry now has the task of identifying how many sessions he requires and which trains he wants to run,  After he has made those decisions I will start pulling it all together and iron out any scheduling issues through completing the train graph for each session.

Tasks Completed in last 30 days 

I realised that any task with a "future target date" previously reported completed were still showing so this month any completed task had their target date updated to the reflect completed date (that's why 19/8 has so many completed tasks.  In future I will try to remember to update the target to the completed date if completed early!

Scheduled Tasks for next 90 days

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

-ooOOOoo-