Despite sniffles and snuffles there has been activity throughout the month.

Firstly, we tried an experiment with the small Thomas layout that Tom had proposed would run in the entrance foyer at the exhibition, close to where the ticket table and refreshment area would be situated. The question was, could we try an innovative way of providing refreshments?

It was slightly out of gauge but the main difficulty was that it hid the points so that shunting it became a matter for blind faith.

 

 

The new 00 club layout has buildings arriving.

Nancy not only made them, but in anticipation of storm Doris, posed the houses in suitably weather-beaten situations, or is it cliff-top erosion?

Things are happening on the 0-gauge layout faster than I can keep track off, (sorry about that).

I showed the traverser for the 0-gauge layout recently, the latching mechanism and power feed has been added. The implementation is very ingenious, and I suspect with a little tweaking of wire lengths will be finalised so that the plug can only be inserted into the socket for the track which has been locked by the latching mechanism.

 

The n-gauge test track with John keeping a watching eye on his Austerity.

Both inner and outer loops still need some fettling as the slight variations in levels which an 009 train would handle are just enough to cause couplings to disengage from time to time. My own Cato 2-6-0 was similarly finding the crossing a great temptation to let go a wagon or two. I had to screw down the backscene as I had knocked it over twice during Tom’s talk on cameo layouts.

 

And on Albert, the 00 test track, we managed recently to get the Pullman electric loco to run around without buffer-locking or derailing on the curves, (here seen berthed in the station).

The answer was surprisingly simple, swap the 16 or 17 KayDee NEM-pocket couplers for a size 20. Rather annoyingly it was the only size 20 coupling in the whole pack, so only one end of the loco has been treated. We need a few more size 20s, or possibly a solitary size 20 for the other end of the loco and some size 19s in the coach pockets.