A Normal Day

Finally a normal day. The weekend was a long one as Thursday to Sunday I attended another great Australian N Scale Convention which was held in Brisbane - fantastic fun and lots of information gained and ideas thought of.

So today was back to a more normal pace and onto the HO layout for a bit more work. I hooked into installing the two points to cater for the Cement Factory and the Warehouse area. This time I remembered to drill the hole under the point for the point motor to connect to the tie bar at a later date. All track edges were filed and smoothed so that track rubbers and cleaners don't catch and the power droppers all soldered into place about half way along the points. Once I collected all the tools to do the job it really didn't take too long to complete.

After this I gas bagged a lot and B1 got into fixing up the N scale Exhibition layout as we found over the weekend that the join between the engine facility and the factory modules was damaged. The fix was to detach and attach afresh, the hinges and to also chisel out some of the end timber work to allow the Kato adjustable joiners to sit down a little bit more. End result - perfect!

John B was doing some more work down at the left of the station area and it is getting closer to completion of the foam work.

My next job today was to make a large batch of "filler" with my recipe of the day - 2 tubes of No More Gaps, a couple of teaspoons of acrylic poster paint for colour, half a dozen handfuls of sawdust and the same of foam beads. A drop or two of water and all stirred up to a consistency of very thick oatmeal. This I then used to fill a heap of holes, gaps and missing foam on the end of the peninsula I have been working on. This does a number of things for the foam work. First it fills the holes and such, second it it fills all the small imperfections where foam beads have pulled out leaving a fairly rough surface for being a paddock or rolling hill and thirdly it gives a tough skin on the foam to help prevent future damage to it.

There is still more filling required, but by noon I was almost done with the first batch so figured there was no time for a second as the train runners would start playing trains soon. So I cleaned up and then as a last item - placed a sign on the hill.

Dial back the time to yesterday when Greg B came saw me at work (we work in the same building, in fact for the same department). Greg had found an old advertisement while hunting on the web and decided it would make a great sign on the layout - particularly since the end of the peninsula is really only being sceniced temporarily until Keith S can get time to build his township. If we all remember back to the early days on the northside of Brisbane, there was a fella. This fella pretty much appeared to own the northside as he sure did a lot of development and selling of land. The fellas name was Bill Bowden. 

One particular area he did was of course Strathpine. We all remember the slogan: "Little Aspley - that's Strathpine", and that is the sign. So Greg scaled and printed out a sign and added some posts and I decided to plant it today. So I got some dirt, grass and 50/50 water/white glue and planted it all.

So I reckon we have a very appropriate sign and probable name for that end of the peninsula!