Easter comes to an end.....

This will be a fairly short post as we really only got about a half day of work completed.

Most of the morning was wasted on a shopping trip. I was waiting at Bunnings at 9:00 am Monday morning as soon as they opened – me and about 100 other people. It took me until about 11:30 am to finish getting what I needed and get back home. Meanwhile, Raymond was beavering away laying the mining branch loop and a siding for a proposed loco shed for locos servicing this branch. These locos would not be the big K Class locos but smaller 2-8-0 and
2-6-0 locos.

Raymond got most of the loop laid by the time I arrived home. I started installing the plywood so we could further extend the eastern end of the yard we were working on.

We now started to come across a few technical issues. I had designed the track so a turnout coming off the main line passing loop at the eastern end would not be fouled by the L-girder below. However, when we moved this track that extra 3/4 inch it placed that turnout squarely above the L-girder. This causes Raymond all sorts of issues in trying to install the Cobalt motor. There was to be a second turnout to join up with the mining branch further eastwards of the first turnout. We just managed to have this second turnout clear of the L-Girder that was causing us some grief. But, I had another turnout to be installed on the mining branch to lead into the proposed loco depot. It turned out that this turnout would be over the L-girder. Raymond was adamant that this track arrangement should be scrapped. So, temporarily at least, we are looking at the loco shed becoming a dead-end accessed off the western end of the mining branch loop rather than as a passing loop as I had envisaged.
The new yard from the eastern end. The mining branch loop is the track on the left, then the engine shed track (the crossover linking to this can be seen in the background). The turnout situated above the L-girder can be seen on this end of the main line loop and the main line is the right hand track.

We also had a very long discussion about some industrial sidings I had proposed at the eastern end of the yard. Originally I had thought we could have two dead-end sidings serving a smelter works (related to the mining branch). I now got an idea that we might also be able to include a siding to service the Dolores Conoco Oil Depot a laser-cut kit from Raggs to Riches that Raymond had bought some time ago. Again we found that O Scale ain’t small. This kit measurs 11 inches by 27 inches and much discussion was had about how we could locate it.
The new yard from the western end. The track in the foreground is a dead end siding that will service a warehouse building. There is a 20 mm gap between the two baseboards which will become a cess when the scenery is installed. The two tracks in the foreground will cross it on a timber culvert.

So we tossed around a lot of ideas and finally decided we needed to consider the situation more carefully during the coming week.

Overall we made some good progress on the layout over Easter. It was not as much as we had hoped but still a few large steps in the right direction. The Tuesday Nighters will be meeting at our house next week so we will have something positive to show them.