Progress on Gunnedah yard has been slow the last few months, mainly because of extensions to the house going on which have made access to the shed challenging at times. But with building work nearly completed, life should get back to normal (whatever that is) and hopefully work will commence on the layout again.
My dad visited a couple of months ago, and we spent quite a few days down in the shed, and got a fair bit of work done which was good. We mainly concentrated on getting dropper wires soldered to every set of points, of which there are about twenty-four in the Gunnedah yard part of the layout.
It's amazing sometimes how much time it takes to complete what sound like simple tasks. Even though each set of points had already had a dropper soldered to the frog, meaning that only two more wires needed to be attached, by the time you measure and cut forty-eight pieces of wire, strip the insulation of each end, tin one end, and then carefully solder each wire to a set of points, quite a lot of time is consumed.
As well as getting all of the dropper wires soldered to the points, we also managed to get all of the point motors mounted to the points. This was another of those seemingly simple tasks that once multiplied by twenty-four was a time-consuming task.
The good thing is that we are basically at the stage where we can start putting the foam underlay for the track and points for Gunnedah yard, then holes can be drilled to run all of the wiring through, and once the track is permanently in place, each module can be pulled out, flipped over, and all of the wiring for that module can be done. This will be one of those jobs made far easier by the modular construction method I have used.
I have been on the lookout for a silo for Gunnedah, regretting somewhat not purchasing one of the Auscision ones when they came out, but fortunately one popped up for sale only a few suburbs away, so I grabbed it without hesitation.
Even though Gunnedah has a S041 silo and the one I have purchased is a S024 style, I am not terribly worried. The positive aspect is that the S024 has a narrower footprint which will fill the available space much much better.
So a bit of a lacklustre update this time, hopefully in the coming months some more progress will be made and a more interesting update will follow.
