exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

More prep for the upcoming exhibition...

Fitted decoders to my three smallest old locos, as space is a premium on the layout, and labelled them so that visitors know what address each has and which end is the front and rear.


Then started mocking up the trackwork for the "scenic" board, making sure that it fits on a 4ft x 2ft board.


Amazingly I managed to get the 40-50 year old Hornby steel track, which had been gently corroding in a damp Cornish loft for nearly 40 years, operational again with the help of 600 grit wet & dry (to take the magnetite and haematite off the rails) and then polished with a track rubber and some Electrolube on the points. That will same a few hundred quid on the project as I shouldn't need to buy any new stuff.

With that I'm going to have to put all my projects on hold and do the detailed planning and packing for the Norwegian cruise I'm going on at the end of the week. I'm glad that I got this far with the RetroFest stuff as I'll only have 6 weeks to get the materials and build the layout after I get back. That's going to be a bit tight.

:excited:

Can't wait to see the final result !

@stephen_usher enjoy your cruise, my wife and I went on the P&O Norway one a couple of years ago. You'll have a good time, especially if you like heights :D

PhilC wrote: 24 Mar 2025 08:07 @stephen_usher enjoy your cruise, my wife and I went on the P&O Norway one a couple of years ago. You'll have a good time, especially if you like heights :D

Thanks! It's a Hurtigruten cruise from Bergen up to near Nordcap and back to Oslo. I have been to N.Norway before, in 2006, with a Uni society trip and did an afternoon/evening loop trip which included sailing back on a Hurtigruten ship so I sort of know what it's like.

stephen_usher wrote: 24 Mar 2025 09:05

PhilC wrote: 24 Mar 2025 08:07 @stephen_usher enjoy your cruise, my wife and I went on the P&O Norway one a couple of years ago. You'll have a good time, especially if you like heights :D

Thanks! It's a Hurtigruten cruise from Bergen up to near Nordcap and back to Oslo. I have been to N.Norway before, in 2006, with a Uni society trip and did an afternoon/evening loop trip which included sailing back on a Hurtigruten ship so I sort of know what it's like.


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Nice :)

Back from the fjords... Time to work on properly designing and building those baseboards for the display.

stephen_usher wrote: 12 Apr 2025 20:50 Back from the fjords... Time to work on properly designing and building those baseboards for the display.

Hope you had a good time :)

rubber_jonnie wrote: 13 Apr 2025 09:20

stephen_usher wrote: 12 Apr 2025 20:50 Back from the fjords... Time to work on properly designing and building those baseboards for the display.

Hope you had a good time :)

Well, other than the gastroenteritis on the fourth day and 48 hour quarantine it was good. Having said that, I don't think that I'll go on a cruise again. After about a week it started to feel a bit claustrophobic.

Oh, and after months and months of high solar activity and aurora it suddenly went quiet... and the high pressure over Britain meant that N.Norway was very cloudy too... so only a couple of glimpses of weak Northern Lights unfortunately.

stephen_usher wrote: 13 Apr 2025 09:35

rubber_jonnie wrote: 13 Apr 2025 09:20

Hope you had a good time :)

Well, other than the gastroenteritis on the fourth day and 48 hour quarantine it was good. Having said that, I don't think that I'll go on a cruise again. After about a week it started to feel a bit claustrophobic.

Oh, and after months and months of high solar activity and aurora it suddenly went quiet... and the high pressure over Britain meant that N.Norway was very cloudy too... so only a couple of glimpses of weak Northern Lights unfortunately.

Oh no, sorry to hear you had a bit of a bad time and had to be quarantined! We had been talking about a similar cruise, but I do wonder about the claustrophobia too. I once sailed on HMS York from Portsmouth to Gibraltar, and felt similar even just after a few days travel.

Shame about the weather and limited Northern Lights too.

You've given me food for thought.

Don't get me wrong... there's no real way to visit a lot of these places without being on a ship, it was worth it for that.

Just don't sign up for the "excursions" as most of them were local and could have been just as well just walking, saving a few hundred pounds each!!! (There were two notable exceptions with reasonable distant coach travel, but these turned out to be the cheaper ones!!!)

It seemed that most of the people on the ship had come in largish groups from Australia and the USA and spent a lot of the time in the forward bar just drinking together from the time the bar opened at 1pm until late evening, using their "food and drink" package to the full.