February 2012 Volume 3, Issue 2

OUR FEBRUARY MEETING

No latecomers today! Under the pergola at the Prattis

residence we had 20 assembled and all ready to go a couple of minutes before our All-Powerful Leader’s whistle blew. To reach that magical figure of 20, one member had literally been roped in, namely the large dog securely roped to one of the pergola supports. The dog was very happy to be part of the meeting, having clearly fallen in love with John Gillies.

Announcements

Our Fearless Leader announced that, because the Division 2 modular layout has been stripped bare, we are not in a position to display it at any exhibitions for the whole of this year at least.

Since it is NMRA policy to exhibit something at all exhibitions if at all possible, what then do we exhibit? We need to put in an appearance at Kaleen (Mar-Apr), Malkara (Aug) and Bungendore (Oct).

John Prattis displayed and demonstrated his easily portable switching (‘Timesaver’) layout. Tony Payne and Stephe Jitts both have similar layouts. For full information on the ‘Timesaver’ (developed by John Allen about 40

years ago) see http://www.wymann.info/ShuntingPuzzles/sw-timesaver.html

Rob Nesbitt pointed out that, to be a true ‘Timesaver’, all rolling stock must be equipped with Baker couplers as used on John Allen’s famous Gorre and Daphetid layout. Yes, that’s quite correct, but mostly that is ignored and any old couplers, usually Kadee, are used.

But what are Baker couplers anyway? Well, they’re rather like those used on Hornby, Tri-Ang and Bachmann models, with a fixed horizontal loop and a movable vertical hook that is lifted up to uncouple and drops down over the other wagon’s loop to couple up. See http://www.gdlines.com/GD_Galleries/Miscellaneous/slides/baker2.html and http://www.gdlines.com/GD_Galleries/Miscellaneous/slides/baker3.html

Having got that sorted out and the meeting called to order, we returned to the possible use of a ‘Timesaver’ at exhibitions. Good idea! OK then, now how about using two at once and encouraging audience competition? The merits of this were debated.

In the meantime, John Prattis demonstrated how to operate the Timesaver. But the loco speed was set too fast, John was out of practice and the loco wheels and

track needed cleaning. The ensuing chaos caused the meeting to develop serious doubts about the desirability of staging public competition between inexperienced drivers chosen at random. Maybe better to have just one Timesaver and let someone have a drive until patience is exhausted or a queue starts to build up. Further thought is needed. Wal Pywell mentioned the Kalmbach DVD library available to NMRA members in USA. Is there any way this can be made available to Australian members? Our Noble Leader replied yes indeed there is. Just email our Regional Librarian, Paul Morrant, at librarian@nmra.org.au or phone him on 4959 6683. DVDs on loan are sent directly to members, to whom the only cost is that of posting DVDs back afterwards. Advice was sought as to whom we should vote for in the forthcoming NMRA election but our Intrepid Leader promptly collapsed in a quivering heap of jelly,

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The Flimsy The Newsletter of Division 2 of the NMRA AR

From L to R: Rob Nesbitt, Tony Payne and Stephen O’Brien

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refusing to impart any information which might influence voting in any way. Well OK, who shouldn’t we vote for then? Our Dauntless Leader remained staunchly daunted. Someone suggested drawing an extra box on the ballot paper and voting for our Mighty Leader. Another voice was heard to remark that he’d be massively outvoted anyway by all the voters who regularly vote likewise for Bart Simpson and Mickey Mouse. The meeting was yet again called to order.

Show and Tell

Viv Brice displayed 5 newly purchased boxcars made by various makers and representing various lines. This is part of his programme of building up his fleet of ‘foreign’

cars so that he has a realistic proportion of the right type of freight cars to be seen on Pennsy tracks in 1956.

Instead of a new Loco Of The Month, Rob Nesbitt displayed a Denver and Rio Grande HO scale loco that he has just restored. Its brass finish had suffered severely from prolonged contact with sponge foam in its box. Fully restored, well painted and with well applied decals, it now looks really good, as seen below. Rob also displayed a similar brass loco, not yet restored. The damage to its finish from the sponge packing was painfully apparent and rather sad to see. It was also a timely reminder that many ‘protective’ packaging materials are chemically active and can damage the very items they are meant to protect.

Jess Brisbane displayed some O scale masonry walls she has been building from her own castings. Jess had started with individual stone blocks, assembling them into a wall of suitable size and then making a master mould from the assembled wall. Unfortunately the mould did not separate at all well from the wall. For the second attempt she varnished the original wall and this time used fresh mould release agent. This worked well. Next step was to attack the fresh wall casting with various tools, creating a less regular surface to give an aged appearance. From this, she made a new mould and then cast as many extra walls as she needed. Ross Balderson suggested the use of talcum powder rather

than varnish to assist mould release, thereby better preserving the texture of the original stone.

To disguise the joins between the wall castings, wooden piers will be laid against the wall. Had Peter Dinham been present he would have been quick to point out that these piers were over the joints so that you couldn’t peer into the joints. Groan! Come to think of it, what’s Peter’s excuse for not being here today? This question was referred to the Div 2 Inquisition for action.

Graeme Hodges the First drew our attention to TrainBoss talking train defect detectors produced by Boulder Creek Engineering. As the train passes the detector the defect detector program is activated, giving a verbal report in the voice of your choice. See http://www.bouldercreekengineering.com/. A viewing of the 5-minute demonstration video on the Boulder Creek homepage is recommended for an understanding of just what can be done.

Stephe Jitts proudly displayed the February 2012 issue of Australian Model Railway Magazine which contains no less than two photos of him! Celebrity status at last! Not only that, but it also contains a 7-page article on Stephe’s Kangaroo Valley HO scale layout plus an excellent front cover picture. This issue of AMRM does the Kangaroo Valley Historical Railway proud, and the main article written by Stephe himself is both informative and highly readable. The fifteen photos are of extremely good quality – as indeed they should be. James McInerney, the photographer, spent a full day at Stephe’s place accumulating a simply enormous quantity of photos from which only the very best have been picked for publication.

Brian Thomas displayed two O scale NSW tanker wagons (Texaco and Shell) scratchbuilt by a friend in Sydney. Handling these wagons revealed their true weight – quite astonishingly heavy for those more familiar with HO or N scale rolling stock. Wondering what we dopes had been expecting, Fran Thomas was quick to point out that of course these tankers were full!

John Gillies drew attention to the Bargain Depot on the Walthers website. See http://www.walthers.com/exec/page/bargain_home. Goods wagons, passenger

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Rob Nesbitt’s restored D&RGW 2-8-0 together with an identical loco waiting to be restored for comparison

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cars, scenery, structures, track and accessories are available here for surprisingly low prices, but only for HO and N scales. John showed us two recent acquisitions from the Bargain Depot – an unpainted UP prototype dining car worth about $70 and which cost John about $23. and a Thrall 53 ft gondola worth about $30 and for which he paid $14.

John also displayed Lance Mindheim’s book on How to Operate a Modern Era Switching Layout. For more information on this book and on other useful books by the same author, see http://www.lancemindeim.com/ and his bookstore at Amazon, .http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=Lance+Mindheim&x=18&y=22

John Prattis showed us an eye-catching souvenir of his last visit to USA in the form of a 1000-piece jigsaw,

assembled and mounted on a board. Portraying the ‘Iron Horse’, the jigsaw is not in a conventional rectangular shape but follows the shape of a Rogers type loco and its impressive cloud of smoke. The grey cloud is full of smoky horses – or is it horsey smoke? In due course it will be mounted on the train room wall.

John also showed us the current state of progress of the next layout he is assisting David Low with. This is to be on Sydney’s western line about a century ago, at one of the original four stations along the line from

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Sydney to Parramatta. So far only the sign has been built – Ashfield 1901 – but it is a most impressive sign, certainly worthy of a turn of the twentieth century railway station on one of Sydney’s main lines.

Under the pergola where our meeting was held, John pointed out a healthy specimen of a sedum plant. Very versatile plant this one. Not only have its uses included treatment of epilepsy and skin disease and promotion of abortions, but it is also used by railway modellers for modelling eucalypt trees. After flowering, its heads can be dried out and then be used as base structures for HO scale eucalypts. These days, railway modelling is the main use of sedum because the unfortunate side effects

of its therapeutic use have far outweighed any benefits.

The Main Attraction

With a thunderstorm threatening, we left the relative protection of the pergola and trooped up the backyard to The Railway Building. The big shed is now fully insulated, painted and carpeted. Electric power and air-conditioning have been installed. Access to the building is by hinged door for people and by garage roller door for larger items (eg a portable layout for exhibition elsewhere). Sensibly, there are no windows to impair the building’s specific function.

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John Prattis displays progress to date on his new layout,

‘Ashfield 1901’, to (from L to R) Ross Baldersion, Charlie

Dearling (behind John) and Stephe Jitts

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The remnants of John’s NSW Zig-Zag layout in his previous home have now been extracted from storage. David Low has sold his Eskbank HO scale layout to John and it is now in this building too. Eskbank (portraying Lithgow NSW in 1899) was one of the best layouts on display at the Bungendore exhibition last October. John intends to incorporate the public display part of Eskbank into his new layout which will also include the famous Lithgow Zig-Zag. If required for exhibition, John plans to

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allow the Eskbank section to be detachable from the main layout for removal through the adjacent roller door. John hopes to be operating trains on his new layout later this year, with scenery to follow later.

In between a few short storms we returned to the house for afternoon tea where Julie happily joined the group, observing how nice it was to see the food being really appreciated as it was enthusiastically consumed with astonishing speed.

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John showing how Eskbank will fit into his new layout, with

(from L to R): Charlie Dearling (nose and …), Mal Risby,

Stephen O’Brien, John Gillies, John Prattis (pointing), Ross

Balderson, Wal Pywell, Jess Brisbane, Ken Macleay and John

Bullen

Scenes from ‘Eskbank’

By Ed: There are times when our roving cameraman’s

humour worries me

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MR 75 year DVD Collection by Rob Nesbitt

After registering my interest in these in June last

year, my copy finally arrived. It was worth the

wait.

Contained in the 3 DVDs was the entire

printed copy of Model Railroader's first 75 years

(up until 2009). A small printed sheet described

the load process, and the first DVD was inserted

into the PC drive. After selecting the destination

folder, the loader loaded up a light version of the

application in around 20 minutes. The light

version only takes up 2 GBytes of disk drive

space, but it does not contain full contents - the

application relies on being able to access the

original DVDs

This option seemed to me to be overly

awkward, but the option to load up the full

contents only takes 25 GBytes of Drive

space. Well, another hour or so later, all

contents were installed on my laptop's hard

drive. Note. It should be possible to load this

application on an external drive, or even a

32Gbyte thumb drive, but having it on the laptop

seemed to be suitable for me. The application

loader puts an icon on the desktop, so access is

straight forward.

Once in operation, the covers of all MRs are

displayed, along with a "search" engine. If one

wants to simply browse an edition, simply move

the mouse over the edition, and click. The copy

is effectively a PDF file, however, I was more

interested in the search capability.

For a quick search, both Title and Author fields

can be browsed for a word, or name, or a

selection with Boolean algebra (and/or). The

search engine will then highlight this word or

name in a thumbnail image of the article, or

selection of articles. Rollover the mouse to the

one you want, click on it, and this will enlarge

the article for your reading pleasure.

For a more complex search, the actual contents

of the article, OR advert can also be

browsed. To see how effective this was, I

entered "Don Drew", and less than a minute

later, I had 5 magazines selected, and only 3

actually mentioned "Don Drew". The other 2 had

some reference to a Don drawing

something. [Don Drew was the 2nd owner of

Pacific Fast Mail]. I then tried finding a reference

in an advert. I chose the place name from an

address of one of the brass dealers, and in

around a minute, I had 187 matches - besides

the advert, one match identified the location on

an old timetable in a 1940s article. I call that a

success.

So, I think this will be a very useful

application, and will allow me the luxury of

pruning my MR collection. But that is another

story.

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ExactRail Boxcars by Viv Brice

As noted in this month’s meeting notes, in show and tell, I

showed some boxcars that I had just purchased, including 3

Intermountain, 1 Fox Valley and 1 ExactRail. They all looked

very nice with excellent detail, but the Fox Valley and the Ex-

actRail were probably just a cut above the others.

Now before I put any cars on my layout, I check for weight,

couplers, wheel gauge and rolling performance. All of these

were correct for weight, their couplers matched the Kadee cou-pler height gauge perfectly and all wheels were in gauge ac-

cording to my NMRA gauge. I then tested them for rolling

performance.

I do this by setting them onto a high point on my layout and

seeing how far they roll. I set them on a 3% grade, which goes

curving away downhill for about 2.5m and then enters my hid-

den staging for about 4.5m on the level. An acceptable car will

roll at least 2 metres into the staging. The Intermountain and

Fox Valley cars rolled well and indeed one of the Intermoun-

tain cars rolled so far past the staging that it actually ran back-

wards off the grade at the far end! But the ExactRail car would

not even start to roll on the 3% grade—awful. So I took the trucks off and used my Micro-Mark truck tun-

ing tool to shape the axle bearings and this process seemed to

take a lot of plastic off. Unfortunately, the ExactRail trucks

have moulded on brake rigging which has to be removed prior

to using this tool, and it can only be removed by cutting it off.

Since this is a working car, the loss of this nice bit of detail

does not bother me. Once the bearings had been reamed out, I

tried again—this time it did roll but it only barely passed my

rolling criterion.

Why am I telling you all of this? Because exactly the same

thing happened with the last ExactRail car I bought—looked beautiful but wouldn’t run, and I wrote about that in last May’s

Flimsy. I have used the “contact” section on the ExactRail

website to send them an email explaining this problem but so

far without any response. For such beautifully detailed and

accurate models, this is not a good advert for them.

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US Licence Plates

Following up on some earlier discussion, Jess has

provided the following information on some sites that

offer pictures of US Vehicle licence plates:

This one has photos of plates from different years for all

US states:

http://www.worldlicenseplates.com/world/NA_USAX.html

This one’s the parent site, with licences from all over:

http://www.worldlicenseplates.com/

Here’s a history of licence plates in Massachusetts. Other

states’ DMVs may have similar info:

http://www.mass.gov/rmv/history/

And this one will let you make vanity plates for any US

state:

http://acme.com/licensemaker/

And of course, there’s still theoriginal one that David

O”Hearn noted: http://www.highlandsstationllc.com/

images/PDFs/HO%20Scale%20License%20Plates.pdf

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18.4 x 13.6

www.nmra.org.au

2-6-0 narrow gauge tank engine of the Ballenberg Dampfbahn of Brienz, Switzerland (John Bullen)

Disclaimer: Disclaimer: Disclaimer: Disclaimer: Any resemblance between

characters in this newsletter and real model railroaders is

purely intentional but no offence whatever is intended. Only

the facts may have been altered to protect the guilty. Every

reader has the right of reply and we look forward to publish-

ing them!

National Model Railroaders Association

Australasian Region—Division 2—ACT

Bringing model railroading to you

From the Editor:

Another month goes by and still I wonder if any-one ever reads this section, because I’m short of articles and short of prototype photos for the back page. Nice to see John Prattis’ shed coming on so well and his plans for integrating Eskbank into his home layout are fascinating. Makes me real-ise that I have been (and am continuing to be) very lazy with regard to my own layout. Still, nothing much will happen there now until I re-turn from our forthcoming European trip. While this is mainly a river cruise and a coach tour, I will be travelling on a bunch of trains across the south of France and the top of Italy—should be fascinating. Viv div2sup@nmra.org.au

News

Next meeting will be at Tony Payne’s place on

Saturday 17 March February

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