Our final physical meet of 2023 at the St Osyth village hall went by quite nicely. A small contingent of the HOers agreed to show up an hour early to try and minimise the impact on normal operations as we prepare our proposed layout for the 2024 NMRA Convention and allow Rai to fix a troublesome crossing on Peach Meadows.
The N scale also had a most welcome addition from Dean H with the brand new 180 degree corner, and I must say it looked very impressive and extremely professional. I was very pleased to hear a buzz around the area with the N Scalers running their trains up and down that portion of the layout. It certainly did feel like this meet was when the U-Bend layout became a reality, and even if I don’t model in the scale, it’s going to be exciting to watch the plan unfold.
We also had the pleasure to see Paul P’s work in progress modules, which in themselves, rivalled Dean’s craftsmanship and care. Paul attached and matched them to the end of Laxton, and is planning to have it as a urban-running layout where there appears to be plenty of interest for spots and shuffling. There were also comments about how clean and exact his board joins were, especially between the switches.
I believe everyone whom brought a train had a run of Paul’s layout; I managed to get my RDCs onto it and they ran just as good as the track looked. It, alongside Dean’s 180 degree board, are certainly items to follow in 2024. It would be nice for me to have my own contributions, but it may be some time before I could match such contributions.
Besides from seeing Rai and Chris C join us this time, we were also pleased to see Michael T and a potential new member for the HO. He was very kind to help us set up and did seem interested in both scales so fingers crossed we’ll see him again sooner rather than later. This time around I elected the Super Chief and the twin Budd RDCs to join us, the latter of which had one of the locos upgraded to ESC sound, and the former having a new car (and missing the diner because I simply forgot to bring it!), but more on that in a bit.
We did have a couple of hiccups on the HO; it seems the Pi had troubles with the IP address again and Michael T managed to help Paul H resolve it so the Wifi Throttles would work. However, due to the desire to run some consists and double headers, I managed to work out (criminally inaccurate: I read) how to get the consists to work on the Lenz handsets so fingers crossed the handsets are no longer a limiting factor when it comes to downtime with the pi or general maintenance.
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For me, this physical meet was an opportunity to aim for a goal I haven’t participated in since the summer; detailing my Santa Fe passenger car fleet. This time it was a Palm Series sleeper regularly used at the end of the main consists. It was an opportunity to creep closer to the goal of a fully-detailed consist, and finally model the end of train. Since I have already touched upon a Pleasure Dome and a 36-seat Diner, naturally I focused on the Super Chief consist but with the conundrum if I were to run the car in the combined Super Chief and El Capitan (aka Super Cap) consists, I’d need to a way to change between the famous drumheads.
In the week or so run-up to the meet, I managed to get a prototype working and then used that prototype to act as the first drumhead. This is what you see in the picture at the top and just below this wall of text. These utilise pin header connections, and they were able to bridge the door gate and the door itself. Then it was just a scramble to get a decoder, some basic lighting and the drumhead connections to work in time for this physical meet.
I was very pleased to find the sleeper and the drumhead ran very well with only a few minor issues in terms of derailments here and there. There is also a potential electrical engineering issue where the drumhead is dimmer when the other installed lights are on, and I suspect it is because it is competing directly through a string of LEDs on the common as opposed direct off the decoder and capacitor.
Finally, I realised the drumhead style I used needed to also have a red light if it was to be used with a car like this, however that was the beauty of a removable drumhead – I can build another with the red light and swap them out. I have some other priorities to attend to over the coming weeks, but I hope I can continue intermittently working on this sleeper, get it to a state where I am very happy with it, and move on to the next.
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After lunch, I dedicated some time troubleshooting Kian’s locomotives for him; they were giving him trouble during the last meet and I had brought my NCE Power Pro kit along with track and crocodile clips. All problems were fixed or otherwise managed well, especially considering one of the troublemakers was actually DC! After that both gangs flexed in some last minute loops, with the Super Chief having one special run recorded on camera for the channel, and Michael a little extra time as we started slowing down and going quiet. We concluded our running at around 15:15 with a few last minute dashes, and was comfortably out by 16:45.
It was a very good turnout today and there is hope for it to be the start of a promising 2024.
Neal K
Santa Fe all the way
Thamesiders MRG 