26/10/2010

My dad and I put up the ceiling sheets in the garage with the aid of a lifting device I rented for the day. It was well worth the $55 I spent and saved a lot of lifting and swearing. It will take a bit more time to fill in the gaps and cornices before I can paint the ceiling but at least the project is underway and the room looks great. So far it has cost about $320 in materials but it increases the value of the house, that's what I tell my wife anyway.




A little late but here is Pha and Alisha on Christmas morning with something every little girl wants for Christmas, when you press the smoke stack the whistle sounds and it chuff's along the floor about two meters playing music. It has encouraged her to start crawling too chase after it

Doing the ceiling

Dad and I have started doing the ceiling in the train room, my dad has never seen the pont in my facination for model trains but none the less he is giving me a hand with finishing the room off. He is retired now and it gets him out of mums hair for one day a week. The battens are up and I will be picking up the ceiling sheets tomorrow, thank god for nail guns.

14/02/10

The last week or so I have been assembeling a Walthers G.E.O Roberts Printing kit after a false start painting the brick work I just painted the exterior one colour because of the time and difficulty.
The kit goes together really well but when you glue the sides together you have to file away some of the interior window mouldings to get the sides to fit together properly. It will be a flour mill on my layout with silos and loading area for the bulk hoppers and boxcars for bagged flour.
I have also been thinking about the theme of the layout so I have decided to model a fictisious subdivision of the Southern Pacific. To add to the mix it will not be overtaken by Union Pacific. It will be named the Boyne River Subdivision after the Boyne River near my home here in Australia.

2/2/2010

Due to a tropical low dumping almost 250mm of rain in the last two days I have done some indoors work on the planning of the layout. With the plans I had made I put an outline down on the garage floor to test clearances and was surprised by a few things. I have redesigned the peninsula to extend less than before to give 75cm of room between it and the other side of the layout. I have also made more room for the helix by extending the layout by 50cm on that side.

This is the new plan I drew up today a little bit different but the width of the shelves in the same, below is a photo of the markings on the floor I used to test some clearances.