Some Scenery Work

 I've been motivated to do some scenery work to smooth out some of the "rough" edges on the layout. 

One of these was the station platform which is a piece of wood.  This needed some attention so I took the spray paint out and gave it a coat.

Following this I had some picket fences which I had bought some while back and at last I got to erect them - now it looks little more like a railway station.  

Another area I focused on was a corner section which needed some scenery.  I grounded some bark for the ground cover and then added some foliage to continue the scene as there was a noticeable gap in this area - still need to add ballast to many sections of the layout.

Yet another section was the area that I had to pull up to realign the track as discussed in one of the previous blog posts.  This area looked pretty bad so I was compelled to look at it.  I think once I get some ballast on the tracks this area will look better but so far I am quite happy with it for now.

Yet another area I worked on was the cutting - looked pretty bare without any ground cover - so I looked at increasing the appeal of the cuttings with some ground foam and some woodland scenic fine leave foliage

With time spent on the scenery, there is little or no time spent running any trains.

SSD into Laptop

Since I have been using my old HP 2000 laptop to run JMRI and DCC++, the boot up time is extremely slow, taking minutes to boot up into JMRI which I have configured to autostart - so I decided to install a SSD I had lying round. First I had to take a backup of my current .jmri folder and also export the roster so I could then bring it into the new JMRI. Removing the old Hard Drive from the laptop is very easy. Took me about under 5 mins. 

Once the new SSD was installed, I booted into a Linux USB image which allowed me to install the Linux (Fedora 34) distribution. After downloading and installing the latest production version of JMRI, I had to then download Oracle JAVA - JMRI didn't link the default openJava. 

Following this I made some configuration changes e.g. I like to see the date, time and day on the desktop clock and also assigning custom short keys for example to shutdown the laptop at the end of the day - then I did an update on the OS to keep the system up to date and rebooted. 

Now JMRI comes up within 30 seconds compared to previously when it took minutes and it shuts down in 5 secconds.

I am very pleased that the Walker RM does not derail on the section of the layout that I pulled up and realigned. 

I haven't run the Y Class for a while. I noticed it would derail at certain sections of the layout. Running No.1 end, No.2 end bogies would derail. 

I think the Y Class has a broken gear on the No.2 end bogies but I really didn't want to pull up the bogies - so I used my hand made wheel gauge and noticed that the wheels were about .5mm too wide - so using a flat head screw driver I pushed the wheels together and gave it another few laps on the layout and quite amazing - no more derailments! Very happy. 

One of the Tortoise point motors that I had to move from last week, the actuating wire came out of the point hole - I knew it was just not long enough - so I used some aircraft lever wire that I had bought sometime back to replace it.   Had to shave off some of the material on one end to fit into the tortoise point motor hole which was done using a small hobby drill with a drill brush - worked a treat.

Arduino Coding 

Made an adjustment to the automatic signalling - previously after a movement completed two inner laps, the Automatic signal would be set to a Yellow aspect, but if the movement continued again into the inner lap, the signal would stay at Yellow once the movement went passed the signal.  It now displays Red (so the detection is now working).  I usually run a movement like this - Staging --> two inner laps --> station --> staging, however when I am troubleshooting things, or when the guys come over, I will let the movement run like this: staging --> two inner laps --> station --> two inner laps --> station (and on and on) until I set the switches for the movement to exit to staging.

I still have to work on the signalling on the UP end of the yard.  The code needs to be cleaned up - the DN end is working beautifully.  I can enable the signalling on this section to be "manual" or when running continuously, the HOME signals to be in "auto" mode.  

Track Realignment

Busy weekend as I decided to lift up some trackwork. There were frequent derailments on this section, espically with the Walker Railmotor, and have been trying to fix the issue piece-meal. I decided to bite the bullet and pull up the track work and try and fix the issue once and for all. The curve is slightly broader and the point work to staging has also been worked on. Looks alot better now. Will need to run a few more movements over the track work and then reballast and apply scenery. Had to reposition three tortoise points - was quite a big job - hopefully this will stop the incessant derailments on this section of the layout. I think the Walker RM derails because the passenger bodies are too light and need to be weighed down some how since the motor is in the middle of the consist. Did open it up to add weight but could not find any suitable location within the body and also underneath the frame. The Walker RM is the one that gives me the most headaches with derailments. At least the B Class loco runs now without any derailments on this section of track.

As can be seen here - the curve goes out little futher