Layout update

Long time between drinks again, but there's some actual progress to report on!

Overhead catenary!

Not long after the last blog I spent a few days installing the first sections of overhead catenary. The catenary itself is by Peco and I've painted it with Humbrol Matt 120 to give it a weathered copper colour.

I've installed the overheads so that an Auscision 85 can run underneath with the pantographs within 5mm of the catenary wire but not actually touching. Although the catenary itself is sturdy, I have recurring nightmares of a wayward strand of wire ripping a pantograph off, or a derailment of an electric loco ripping the catenary down. I'll need to have a play around with the U set's pantograph springs before I'm comfortable running that underneath with pantographs fully raised.

I'd always intended to have an overhead terminating structure as a scenic feature at the far enough of station, however I can't seem to find the right materials to build it out of. I started making a 3D-print mock up, but again ran out of time to work on it in between life and work and the endless rain on the east coast of Australia seemingly localised entirely in my driveway one Sunday morning. It flooded one side of the train room with 2cm of water but the layout itself was mercifully high and dry. That was two days of potential train running instead spent digging out stormwater drains and mopping up inside the house. I digress.

I tried to start off building the overhead structure with Evergreen styrene pieces but they are just too overscale for my liking and I think I need to come back to the 3D-printing option in future.

Layout details

One detail item I've coveted for the layout for some time are the 'Electric Trains Stop' warning signs. I reached out to Meagan from The Train Girl with the official diagram for these signs, scale measurements for HO and some reference photos and within a day or two she had produced these:

There's two installed on the layout now: one on the platform road leading into the goods siding, and the other on the coal loader to prevent electric locos from passing under the loader (and thus justifying my complex shunting moves for coal trains).

I am very happy with how they've come out. You can also see in the photo above that I've added white clearance markers all over the yard. I've fashioned these from scrap styrene to denote where the uncouplers are in the yard. It has certainly made life easier!

New arrivals

In acquisition news, aside from finding what feels like the last pack of Austrains MLEs on earth, the SDS models' 81 class finally arrived! Apart from the beautiful detail and livery, I've been enjoying running this loco around in a continuous loop with a rake of NHFF hoppers (that I may have been strategically holding onto for the odd foray into the early 1980s) and testing out the Drive Hold function. The sound of notching up and notching down without any discernable change to the train's speed really adds a lot of enjoyment to running trains. It would be a fun feature for layouts with a long run in particular.

Looking ahead

So we're nearing the end of the year now and I've landed a job overseas through work for 12 months. I'm really looking forward to it however, you guessed it, the trains can't come with us. This leaves me with a bit of a conundrum; we don't yet know where we're going to be when we come back to Australia, so what to do with the layout. The trains themselves will live with my brother (have I mentioned you're a top bloke by the way?) but I'd be understandably outstaying my welcome there if the layout moved in with them. 

Again. 

For the second time in as many years...

The other options are a storage container, leaving it at another modeller's house set up and in running order, or selling it. I'm done with storage containers, and whilst I like the idea of the layout getting used by someone whom I respect and trust with it, I may not be coming back to Sydney when we return, hence I would need to arrange a few days to collect it, move it and set it up again. Not to mention potentially rebuilding it to fit a new space. The older my son gets, the more my spare time is consumed with family activities, and the more guilty I feel spending long periods of time in the train room. 

Which leaves me with selling it.

I'm still undecided. 

Am I overthinking this? Possibly. I've always seen moving house as an opportunity to build a new layout, and that may be what happens, but the prospect of moving or potentially selling it means that I've stopped any further detailing work or expansion of the overhead catenary, and am just enjoying running a train in a continuous loop every now and then. 

So that's been a lot more wordy than normal, but it provides a fairly detailed summary of what's happening on the layout and where we're headed. I'll post a 'last hurrah' of train running before we pack up and go, but for now I think I've taken Mount Wilson as far as it can go in it's current form. It's a bit sad, but layouts don't last forever. There's an opportunity in there whichever choice I settle on.

Anyway, happy modelling!

Ben