New project, new platform...

So, I'm starting a new project, and on top of this, I'll be moving to a new blog. I seem to do strange things to most technical things, and I manage to mangle blogger fairly frequently. I found a service I seem to get on with, and which has a couple of nice little extra features as well. I've been blogging here and there for a few weeks, which is a bit wearing, but as it hasn't crashed yet, I'll be moving over there around Monday the 12th. If you subscribe to this blog -and remarkably a couple of tolerant souls do- you shouldn't notice anything different: in fact you should have got the last few updates from the new blog feed already. When you go there, however, you'll hopefully like the new look, and continue to be astounded at the addition of things like extra pages and other wonderfulness. I'm afraid it's unlikely to magically improve my writing, but at least it seems to be immune to my technology destroying tendencies...

There should be final entry on Westerooge before I go, so this is more of an advance warning. If you are one of the kind people who has a link to this blog, can you please change it to there?

In case you missed all the links above, then the place to go is almost the same as here: www.korschtal.wordpress.com

Nearly there...

Less than a week to go, but Westerooge is almost complete. The scenery is down and the track works- most of the time. It isn't as smooth as I'd like but better than I thought I'd manage, so that's not too bad. Even the bit that went wrong is working this time around. The remaining jobs are to repaint the overly vivid sky, (maybe with a representation of some houses in the distance, and the road continuing, but only if I'm feeling brave), add some bushes and a small 'shed' to hide the points switch, paint the black band on the lighthouse and maybe add a crossing sign. On the other hand, I do have a heck of a lot to do before we get on that train on Monday, so I'm not sure I'll even have five minutes to stick things together, and of course I now have a distraction: I want to just play trains...

Even the track join of doom works, most of the time...

Well, it can't always work...

So I started to make the scenery: newspaper all around and in between the rails. After everything had dried, on goes the diesel, and it ran fine except for one little section of track on the end of the sector plate. I suspect I broke a wire when building and painting the scenery. Off came the newspaper, and yes, there was the broken wire. It was a choice of digging up all the scenery until I exposed enough wire to cut back to, or running a fresh wire under the sector plate to power the line directly. I opted for the latter. So, in theory what I needed to do was de-solder the wires on the track, run the fresh wire into place, and resolder. What happened was that the soldering iron was too hot and heated the rails, melting the sleepers and eventually causing the whole lot to fall of in mangled mess.

Well, I wasn't totally happy with the way it was stuck down anyway, and at least on something so small, it isn't too much to replace. It still slows me down a bit though which isn't helpful when I'm so close to the deadline...