Elmer Lane 30 - Clutter

DB returns...

My field research tells me that my Greymouth platform verandahs have too many bays. 

I visited the train dungeon today for a few hours. A few minutes were spent assembling and installing some clutter along my Depot fence.   

Bits of stripwood, some offcuts of rail, and a nice 30 foot bridge from 3 Foot 6 models. This is rather tasty. 

The real thing: 

Hmmmm, needs some weeds added. 

The rest of the time was spent digging out a few locos. With an upcoming show in Chch, I wouldn't mind taking a few models up to run if that is possible. There are two issues here. Some of the locos look a bit daggy. And I'm not sure if many of them actually run.

The first part is easiest to deal with. So a few handrails and other bits were glued back on and a few paint touchups were done.  The blue DFT's front coupler was reattached and it got some MV lens headlights. My blue DC has never had a rear shunters step, so one was made up and some brake hoses were added at the back end. 

As they were to one of my DXCs. The DXCs also had some handrails added to the rear of the long hood to make the 'in between' look better.  

Some of my locos are probably beyond saving. One of the old DFs built in the early 1990s isn't completely terrible, one is a little less pleasant. The DBR, DA and some of the DCs aren't too scruffy. One of the recabbed DGs is OK but could do with some better numbers. One is really ugly. I need to reassemble one of my DJs that has been in bits for the past 12 years....

There are other items of rolling stock that could be looked at too.For example, I need to put some under-rods below my TranzAlpine big window cars to finish them. There are quite a lot of broken couplers on my container fleet, and I should add some weight to some of the wagons too. My 30 foot van needs to be be rebogied. I should also do a cull of some of my really old ugly cast wagons.

In the next week I'll try to fire up the Digitrax and see what locos I can encourage to move.