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Road Trip No.1

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Keeping the flame alive It's June  2025 and my back was still mucking up so leaning, bending, lifting was off the cards. I find walking small distances a good way to keep the back relaxed, the only thing that stopped it from being aggravated was laying on the floor and watching the footy or sitting up straight like I had a pole up my you know what. The best way to stay up straight is with a small pillow in the small of your back I have found, and this seems to assist recovery time. Being a stubborn male, I thought maybe I can use a pillow while I drive a car so came up with the grand plan to take the lady of the house out for the day and go for one of our usual big day's out sightseeing and decided to go to Hervy Bay, the last time we had been up there was around 2019 before the pandemic.  A 3-hour drive and the drive up caused me no harm, but the road coming in from the west seemed a bit flogged up and I came unstuck a little here hitting massive impressions in the bitumen an...
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Committing to the Target Layout

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A Flexible Approach It's late May 2025 and my days of playing AFL are catching up to me with my back playing up every so often usually from cold weather. This time I have a funny feeling I may have lifted a baseboard while in an awkward position and forgot to tell myself before lifting I wasn't 21 anymore so was a little limited on movement and decided to spend some time focusing on the layout planning. Learning from my planning in  Track Modelling  and mucking around with SCARM and testing possible opportunities I finally decided to select the area down Radio Street near the Pinkenba Wharf.  The target area in SCARM with the  baseboard layer hidden This would provide the opportunity to allow for the following: Move my locos out of a cupboard and onto a layout Start using all these points, joiners and flexi track I had purchased Obtain new skills in wiring and electronics Scratch build structures to add character to the layout Explore other ideas in machinery, vehicl...
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Tape, Square, Pencil, Saw....

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And let the building begin! Now that I had obtained everything in  The shopping list  I was ready to begin. One of Mrs Shunter's friends who was into picture framing was kind enough to drop over and loan some framing jigs, so I gave Mrs Shunter notice I was going to turn her lovely patio into a Man Cave and make a mess that weekend as there was wood to be cut. Below is my process of some bushy style carpentry works I had a crack at to get my model rail layout up and running. Preparing the Frames Sorting out lengths for  optimal straight lines and cuts Loose fitting  and surprising myself with straight cuts with a circular saw. All snug in framing jigs and ready for final screwing Baseboard   Loose fitting Baseboard to confirm everything square before screwing with 10G x 75mm countersunk screws Baseboard screwed to frame with 8G x 40mm countersunk screws Baseboard screwed t...
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The shopping list

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Baseboard  Plywood  ✔ After confirming  A modular approach it is!  I decided I would source a good quality baseboard and go for a hardwood, found a local supplier close to home so I popped into the shop. The gentlemen who came to the counter was the owner and took me outside to the warehouse and showed me all the sheets he had available.  He asked what I needed the sheet for and he said most model railway people go for the 9mm or 12mm and suggested the 9mm was good if I wanted to keep cost down, but I felt the 9mm was a bit more flexible and when asking for a quote, there wasn't much difference in price. The shop had a cutting service so I gave my measurements and placed my order for 12mm and was told the order would be ready the following week as the sheets outside were already committed to existing jobs.  Tools   ✔ I did surprise myself as I had enough tools available to build. I used this site as a guide on what I may have needed  Building a ba...
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A modular approach it is!

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How big can I go! As a kid we were very lucky as we had an old pool table and a big chipboard layout my Dad would lift out and set up at various times in our childhood, mainly after the footy season. This was in the shape of a big oval and was Direct Current and my brother and I would put our locos at separate ends and run them around for hours, eventually my loco would get caught by his, as it was new and tighter running gear. Thinking back to the old days and working through the ideas and plans with Pinkenba in my post  Picking the right site location  and  Track Modelling  I knew a large layout was not going to be able to be achieved.  I started to google around to understand how people who had limited space were able to enjoy the hobby of model rail. Initially I stumbled across a few posts with different views on the model rail forums. When looking at video content, I stumbled across this series of videos -  Building A Modular Model Railway - YouTube ...
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Track Modelling

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Kicking the Tyres In order to learn SCARM, I thought I do my own adaption on Pinkenba and the software works as expected.  Pinkenba Version 1 The two things I found tripped me  up was the Points selector, always seemed to choose the wrong turn out type and the Flex Track positioning, I think it was mainly because I was using the trackpad on the laptop instead of mouse, later on this became a little more intuitive, practice makes perfect. The free version of SCARM does not provide a map layer capability, however does allow you to use an image as a base layer which I thought was very generous. Using a simple screen shot was not going to be effective as the quality of the image would be lost as I stretched the image to scale.  T here is a little hack in web browsers where you can take higher quality screenshots to get a better base quality image which I managed to obtain a 4K resolution of Pinkenba. Interestingly once I inserted the image and set it to the size of precinct i...
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SUDO APT

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Setting up  the Linux Box Over the years, my house has become the computer graveyard and I generally try and stop things going to landfill where I can and reuse parts. Therefore, I have several laptops laying around that function but don't have current supported Windows operating systems but will run Linux and be faster to boot than my current work laptop when you choose the right Linux install for your device. I had an old MSI Laptop that was given to me as the LAN/Ethernet port was faulty, and the screen was flickering on Windows and I cho se it for my challenge. For the last 15 years I have used  Debian -- The Universal Operating System . Why? it just works. While the release cycle of new packages maybe slow it is stable and security patches are regularly provided with a committed support period. More Debian history can be found here  Debian - Wikipedia .  Debian supports a range of Desktop Environments within the installer and personally I find the LXQT and KDE t...
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