17.07.06 at 13:38 hrs

Weekly Report No 298, CW 28

Regular visitors may already have noticed that from time to time "empty" spots are seen on the layout. Somebody obviuously nicks the houses... Well, no reason to get excited:

Theses structures havve been removed and taken to the shops for a "refurbishment". Some sections of the layout are nearly 5 years old and need to be modernized, so Knuffingen and the "old" Alps section currently have their water areas repaired...

The surroundings are also modeled in a somewhat "newer" way :-)

Well, as you can see, we still build staging areas. But there's something blinking on the surface. Simple explanation: before laying track, the wooden surface is covered with a fire-protecting paint.

Last week we mentioned that we will build in a 3-rail track section (narrow/regular gauge).

The required turnouts and crossing are scratchbuilt.

Now the testing phase started to determine their reliability and find out about eventual weak points during stress tests.

Now it's back to "Jobs to do": - and we have a lot of them :-)! The dock is now ready for final tests. As already described during the building phase of Scandinavia, pumps are used to lower and raise the dock. But somehow many technical complications arose and time was running out. That's the reason why we just now have time to care for this project again. Anyway, it is still a technical challenge which is why the dock more or less had to be reconstructed since the flood chambers didn't fill or empty evenly.

This made the dock crank or the pumps didn't work with the required force. Now the main body is finished undergoes testing.

Another point on the To-Do list was the whish of our visitors to have more sound on the layout. We invested a lot of time and brainwork to realize this whish without having to install extensive computer-technique. It seems that now we foun d a "simple" solution. This small board in the picture above is built like a small, harddisk-recorder. The sounds are transferred to the board and can be played any time, depending on which sound is needed.