QR @ Pinkenba

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 ...

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...

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...

Modelling isn't a game for Summer At this point I had left the original intent of scratch building and declared myself a model rail hobbyist and wrapped up my  Getting Started  section. The amount of rain and humidity over the summer 2024 and 2025 period was crazy for Brisbane, but  Cyclone Alfred  made everything clear. I like the humidity, but there were days even I was tapping the air-conditioning button first in the house. The period was a mix of rain and humidity on repeat, waiting for a southerly change to come in and take off the edge never seemed to happen. Interestingly looking back at the data from the  Bureau of Meteorology  the rainfall was almost like someone had moved Brisbane towards the equator, so  I turned my focused to Layout Planning. How big is Pinkenba Pinkenba consisted of two aspects a single passenger line station and the main freight facilities, using the magic of google maps, the whole precinct estimation is  Total area:...