More progress on the Chemical Transfer Facility...

Well today I got a chance to do a few little jobs here and there on the layout.  Namely some more painting (airbrushing) of the storage tanks for the Chemical Transfer Facility.

I'd forgotten how much white is a shocking colour to put down, the amount of coats is ridiculous compared with other colours.

So the main storage tanks and smaller tank are ready for weathering, details and final placement onto the L&T Branch...

Next step will be to paint all the piping.

Jas...

Storage Ideas...

Well our recent visit to the JL&T prompted a realisation that the layout needed to be de-cluttered and cleaned.  By de-cluttered about 3/4 of the rolling stock and locomotives needed to be removed and the top deck needed a really good clean.

One of my original ideas was to create a shelving system (narrow enough to hold some flextrack) and place this under the staging area near the L&T branch.  This would allow the quick building of a train directly onto the staging area for dispatching, but then after some more thought I decided against this because of two reasons.

One there really is no protection for the rolling stock or locomotives both from knocks as people walk past or the dreaded big drop.  And they would collect dust and layout debris unless I could come up with some type of cover.  So as I needed a quick fix before the layout visit I went down to our local hardware and came across these:

These units are all plastic have wheels on the bottom so are moveable and are cheap, $30 dollars so I bought four of them to store our rolling stock & locomotives in.  The only issue was how to store them in the draws without them sliding around (being plastic) and not damaging each other.  The solution was actually at the same hardware store in the $2 bin...

Cut to size to fit into the bottom of each draw eliminates rolling around, the off cuts can also be used to place in between pieces that a close together to reduce damaging the adjoining piece.

And here are some of the draws made up and seperated into locomotives by road name & rolling stock by road name and type.

And lastly some rolling stock...

Jas...

JL&T gets a visit...

Well folks we have returned from our fabulous 3 week adventure in the USA, we spent the entire time in CA visiting friends in Ramona, and touring the coast up to San Francisco and into the mountains at Mammoth Lakes. It was a awesome trip, with fantastic weather and great times catching up with our friends and seeing the USA and all she has to offer.

Whilst we where away I got a email from a MRH member from Australia, Rod Warren is a N Scale modeler and founding member of the MelbNTrack Model Railroad Club. Rod is also a published MR author (layout article on his Santa Fe Railway Southern Division) and like myself has his layout in a shed in his backyard, Rod's layout was one of the first that I looked at once I decided to build our layout in a shed.

So we chatted over a few emails and arranged for Rod and his friends John Fahey & Bill Black to visit once we got back from holiday. Last Thursday the guys visited our layout for a few hours and we got to chat about the beginnings of the JL&T, the current status and what the future holds. We also had a small operating session that allowed the guys to run a few of our Tsunami equipped sound locos around (albeit a small glitch that showed that in the past month I'd managed to program 3/4 of our fleet "on the main" and turned off all motor function) the layout and get a feel for it. It was great talking to modelers who have "been there and done just about it all" Rod's layout is fully completed, with signaling and running ops sessions.

For me this is huge as this is exactly the direction I want to take the JL&T so now I have the experts about an hour away that I'll hopefully be able to bounce ideas off, and ask for help as we progress with our build, and of course continue to grow an operating group to run on the JL&T. It will now also allow me to operate on a layout and learn all the finer points on how to operate during ops sessions. Again this is a perfect example of how MRH is bringing together modelers from all over the world!

Jas...