Sitting on the shelf

I finally have my staging shelf operational. But like shelves, it has come with highs and lows.

From the high of a book launch and converting my layout to DCC, to having to lay low for a while with COVID. That's pretty much been my January so far. Any thoughts we had of 2022 being a better year lasted less than a week! After coming down sick, waiting 4 days for the local testing centre to restock their kits so that we could get a booking for a test, and queueing from 4 am for the thrill of having a little pokey stick shoved up your nose, my time off work over the Christmas period was extended by an extra 2 weeks.

Ordinarily that would be my cue to get some stuff done on the layout. However, while I can honestly say I've had a worse case of the flu in the past, the thing I found with getting COVID, was that every ache and pain I ever had at some point in my life decided to come back and visit. Although I'd finished building, sanding and painting the staging shelf over 3 days prior to Christmas, thanks to COVID I couldn't find the strength to pick up a pair of rail cutters! Fortunately, as is the case with most things, the worst passes and things begin to return to normal. Hah! Normal... like anyone knows what that is anymore!

The staging shelf sits to the left side of the layout, and the 2 tracks that lead from the layout beneath the Philden Street overpass transition onto the staging shelf where they fan out into a 4 track yard with a 5th track serving as the arrival/runaround track. Before Christmas, I had lined the perimeter of the staging yard with a strip of timber to eliminate the risk of having anything fall off. I used some 30 x 11 mm lengths of pre-primed finger jointed pine and cut, glued and clamped them into position before sanding and painting the entire staging shelf in the same gloss white water based enamel to match in with the rest of the layout.

I lined the perimeter of the staging yard with 30 x 11 mm edging timber.

Slowly, (over the course of a week and a half while feeling washed out), I did the strenuous task of laying and wiring track on a staging shelf a little over 1.5 metres long. I say that sarcastically, because ordinarily it would only have taken most modellers a single afternoon to complete!

I glued the track to avoid having nails come through the base given the plywood was only 7 mm thick.

I glued the track into place directly onto the painted surface with some Weldbond extra strength white glue, and the finished arrangement of black track on white looks neat and tidy, almost like an abstract piece of model railway art. I'll also decorate the front fascia of the staging shelf with some black vinyl-cut stick-on letters as I did with my last layout, just to give the overall appearance a museum like finish.

I carefully cut and filed the opening for the DCC control panel face to mount it to the layout.

My Christmas present from my wife was a NCE Power Cab DCC system, and I was able to cut and mount the panel to the front of the staging shelf and still have the main digital receiver component tuck in safely beneath the plywood surface. I just used a pair of connector clips to bridge the bus wires to the staging shelf tracks so that the whole thing is easy to disconnect and pack into our car in sections for whenever I'm able to exhibit the layout, or have to move house.

I also found a guy who goes by the name of beanburgh on eBay who 3D prints throttle holders for most brands of DCC handsets. I'm all for supporting the little guys, so for $10 plus postage my NCE throttle now has a permanent place to stay safe alongside the control face plate.

Although I've still wired 2 of the 4 sidings to be able to have the power isolated via a toggle switch, the entire layout is now wired into the DCC receiver, and trains are now controlled by my new DCC throttle. All two of them!

View from the staging shelf looking towards the layout.

That for me is a problem at the moment. Not just because I'm still waiting on my pair of pre-ordered Indigenous NR Class locos to arrive, but because of the worldwide unavailability of DCC decoders. No-one seems to have them on the shelf, (another pun intended).

I guess what that is making me do is figure out which locos I really want to convert to DCC sound, and which locos I will just convert to DCC non-sound. As my layout resides in our lounge room, I'm quickly learning when not to fire up the joyful sound of an EMD 16-567-BC engine, (usually whenever my wife has claimed the TV for an afternoon of watching Virgin River). Having a few silent locos on the roster may not be a bad idea! It will at least help ease the cost of converting my existing DC locos. Anyway, having just had so much time off from our business, January has shelved those plans for now at least, (and there's another shelf pun).

View from the layout looking towards the staging shelf.

Its nice to finally have a propper staging yard. I can load up a 4 wagon train on each track in staging, and one by one work each train to a specific siding in Philden Street Yard. When staging is empty, and Philden Street Yard is full, I can work them all back again. Compared to past experiences operating little cameo shunts like this, having a sound equipped locomotive actually slows down the operating session, and makes each move more thought out and purposeful.

Maybe it was all the time off I had, but the amount of time per day where I'll walk past the layout and think 'I might just run a train' has gone up considerably. From that point of view, I think that converting my layout to DCC has been a success. I discovered a few little hiccups along the way that I was able to resolve, mainly with code 100 track that required some filing away on the backside of the frogs, but the main thing is that it works, and works well. Converting a layout from DC to DCC also helped give me some timely material for my next book Model Railway Trackside Tips. All my years of trial and error may finally pay off.

B65 prepares to take its train from staging to its destination in Philden Street Yard.

I guess whenever you reach a new milestone like this in our hobby, it quickly becomes the new standard. From that point of view, all future locomotive purchases have just become all that more expensive. Compared to the cost of retro-fitting DCC sound to a locomotive, it's actually better value to purchase a sound-fitted loco upfront. That's where I'm left sitting on the shelf at the moment, (I'd better make that my last shelf pun for this post)! Finding the right balance of locomotives to fill out my roster between what is available now in DCC sound equipped and ready to run form, retro-fitting sound to my existing locos when DCC decoders are out-of-stock, or pre-ordering DCC sound locomotives that have no gaurantee of being here before I'm faced with moving house again, is causing some procrastination on my part. And its something I don't seem to have the answer for right now.

B65 arrives at Philden Street Yard with a short grain transfer.

In the midst of all this, one of the new additions to my rollingstock roster I am extremely pleased to have added were some VHGF hoppers I bought from Trainworld in Melbourne. I had one lone Auscision Vline/Carlton United Brewery VHGF that I'd acquired second hand from somewhere, but hadn't realised that Trainworld in Melbourne still had their own branded hoppers available until I stumbled across them on their website. At $180 for a pack of 3, they are equally as good as the Auscision version and give me a 4 wagon grain train that can run as a transfer trip to my industrial district. I can now start planning how to incorporate it into my operations. At this stage I'm thinking my unnamed Distribution Centre may be best served as a micro-brewery, as it could take in hopper loads of malting barley, and ship out loads of palletised beer in my VLCX louvered vans.

Building the staging shelf was the final big project I needed to complete on Philden Street Yard. Converting the layout to DCC was another substantial investment that I can also now tick off my list of things to do. Sound chipping my remaining locomotives may take some time figuring out when decoders will become available in stock again, so maybe I should now turn my attention to completing the few remaining structures on the layout and finishing the namesake overpass. When I can pull myself away from sounding the horn on my locos that is!