April Operating Session

Friday night the 25th May Ops session

   I have an operating session on the SFRSD with most of my mates attending the last Friday of every month. This can range from about 8 to most of the time 12 of us.
   Last Friday we only had 9 to operate which as it turned out worked well. I sat at the dispatchers panel for the night and worked my butt off, one does not realise just how busy it gets once the timetable starts when every signal and turnout on the main needs attention.
   Action started at about 7.45pm after we firstly installed a new Tam Valley combined circuit breaker and booster for Augusta. Over the past few weeks we noticed that the Augusta yard would shut down and found that as more locos arrived this seemed to be the cause. Brendan suggested that this CB could solve the issue. Once connected Augusta behaved perfectly all night.
   Most Friday ops sessions we have struggled to get all the way through however this was not the case last Friday as the Timetable was completed in good time.
   We stopped for "beans" at 9.00pm about half way through and wound up at about 10.45pm with all trains plus one extra from Augusta to Winfield and return completed and of course we just had to run the Directors Special pulled by the new E8.
   As a side the picture of the E8 on the SFRSD is in "Great shots" in the May /June N Scale Railroading along with some from Gordon Bliss with thanks to Kirk.
  

Here is #85 arriving from Augusta East ready to take on the VIP's for the trip across the system.

Two GP60 B units sit at Augusta waiting to be put into service

    The RR operated very well with only a few glitches to be looked at before the next session.
    A great night was had by all the crew so bring on the next session.
Thank you for stopping by.
Rod.
  

Rigging complete

Finally added the rigging
    Well it's been a while however I finally got around to rigging the cables on the side boom crawler today. I had a good reason as it's been raining all day and last night too. We needed it here so nobody's complaining.
     The thread that comes in the kit is quite fine and fairly lint free so I chose to use it. Only issue is that none of the pulleys have the holes in which to thread the cable to have it look anywhere reasonable. So with my optivisor on, good room light and desk light all switched on I set to to drill out all of the pulleys. These came out fairly well so the next task was to thread the cable. This went better than I thought so I was well on the way. I wanted the cable to look taught so as I super-glued the cable to each pulley I applied some tension to the cable by laying one of my weights on the cable.  
     The boom was first and it came out pretty good. Today I did the hook and cable and again put some weight on the hook as it was drying.

I did a bit of dry brushing on the edges of the unit to make it look like it has been put to good use.

   
    Well that is another item waiting to be installed. It should make a nice scene on the SFRSD once installed with some other detail parts.

Thanks for dropping by.
Rod.