Happy New Year and new pictures

Hallo to all Blog readers. After a very busy holiday season and some time off due to sickness, I am back at work on my Lenz O scale layout. The biggest news is that the BR64 has arrived and what a beauty it is. Here it is shown at work with the passenger train.

It is the best locomotive I ever owned, works so smooth right out of the box and responds beautiful to any commands. It has the usual Lenz features, sound and lights and remote uncoupling.

Progress is slow on the layout, for one I am having way to much fun operating and secondly work and home life are taking up a great portion of my time.

I moved the shed to the right side of the layout, and the big white sheet of foam board is were the Raiffeisen Fertilzer and Agriculture supply warehouse is going to be. I made it in to two short sidings, hoping that I have enough space to add a coal and fuel dealer on the opposite site, a place for all the nice tank cars and coal gondolas to go.

Good(s) shed stories

The wind outside is howling and I just put some of the finishing touches on the goods shed. Since it would not fit were I originally had intended it to go I moved it over to the opposite site of the station. There it will sit for a while. Maybe I may re-organize the track layout a bit to make it fit or cut part of the overhang off .

A lot of fiddly work with this card board kit, and I had to add down spouts and rain troughs,
not included in the kit, for the price it should have been included by Lenz.

Ooops, the arrow head got a kink in it, nothing like a photograph to see ones mistakes.

The boxes you can see in the doorway are scratch build using scale wood around a wood cube.

I have been working on the railroad

It is a dark and windy night outside, and I am just relaxing and working on my layout. The Krakow station from Lenz is now finished and I am test fitting it at the moment on the layout.

There is still some more work to be done. I also received the long awaited DCC Lenz turnouts from Addie.
I had to do a site swap with the freight shed and the Raiffeisen warehouse. I am contemplating moving the loco shed to the foreground. I was able to pick up an old kit at the September Railroad show in Victoria.

 I started work on the freight shed. It is laser cut from card stock and takes some time to put together to make it work. Especially the roof trusses are nice to have, but can hardly been seen when the roof goes on.

Kits and other updates

I has been a while since I last added something to my blog. Time and work interfered and I got carried away working on the layout. I started work on the Kalkwagen Kit, but a part took of and I am now waiting to get a replacement. It is  a very well designed kit and when it is finished it will fit in to the box for storage.

I also added the picture backdrops and started adding some ballast, dry for now. Two kits, one for the station building and for the goods shed also have arrived and I am currently working on getting them build.

First kit bashed wagon

I found a G10 refrigerated car from POLA on Ebay. Unfortunately, it does not have the matching coupling system from Lenz and the under carriage detailing is not up to par.
However, I liked the car (it gives me an excuse to endulge in my favorite bevy) and so I found a kit from Addie described here: ?Addie adapted G10 chassis It is an altered chassis that is sold for scratch builder and Kit bashers. It has been adapted so that it fits under the Pola G10, a popular conversion.

I filed the lugs of the beer reefer car and glued it on the chassis from Addie/Lenz. Added the steps and half an hour later it was finished, weathering and some more details I have to order, yet to come.

The cars sit it the fiddle yard that is now all wired and working ok.

V 100 has arrived!!

The new locomotive from Lenz (new for me) has arrived from Addie. The engine is big but beautiful. It is heavy and I love the detailing on it, it has some neat sound effects like the announcement in German that the train is departing. The sound is loud and I am trying to change the CV. In the little room I have it resonates quite a bit and is annoying after a while.
It is pure joy to run, it creeps along when set on the shunting setting, F5, and pulls all the cars I have no problem.

I am so hoping that the V36 will be arriving soon too and am still waiting for the remainder of the DCC controlled switches to finish the track laying.

Bring in the clouds

It has been a while since I posted the last time. Since then I have painted the backdrop with a sky and stenciled in some clouds using a stencil I had. The front of the layout also got a coat of black paint so that the eye can focus on the main attraction, the railroad.

This is how the other side of the main station yard looks like:

I also laid down all the track in the yard and in the fiddle yard as well. Unfortunatly, the DCC controled Right hand switches from Lenz are on backorder and have not yet arrived from the factory at the dealers.

It starts looking more and more like a layout. I painted all the walls black so as to make it quite different from the layout. The track in the front is the programing track and the next job will be to hook it and the rest of the wiring up. I currently have only one pair of wires connected to the layout from the Lenz controller, but have decieded to add a few more as to make sure there is current to all track when ballasting and painting is done.