Kim' Trains

It is hard to believe it is nearly a year later. The set is up and running, I bought some plaster and paints to play with but all went quiet for a while and I never made anything with the plaster at all :( Still things are moving along.

During my mid year break from study, I am doing a Master of Information Systems part time after work, I found myself with some time. I went downstairs and found my m-track had all rusted up. Probably, something to do with sharing space with a clothes dryer; lots of moisture. So I got out some fine sand paper and spend a couple of hours cleaning the track. It was back breaking, dirty and unpleasant. Unpleasant enough for me to upgrade my track to c-track.

Like everything, it was not simple. Apparently, the sizes of m-track and c-track including the curve radii are all different. After a quick trip to the marklin-users.net forum to ask a bunch of questions a lovely chap there did up a track plan for me! How nice! He also pointed me at the track planning software WinTrack 11.0. I went there but found the US$99 was a bit steep for me but there was a demo which installed and ran well. Sadly saving and printing track plans was barred, though I could and did take a screen shot of the plan and saved that. Searching through eBay I found that to reproduce my layout (approximately) would cost over $500. That seemed a little daunting, but in hindsight I probably should have done it ;)

Well, now I am buying bits and pieces of track, some from each pay packet. I did go out on a bit of a spree and bought 3 2nd hand locos and 6 second hand wagons. They were so cheap and nice and fit my layout (WW2 theme) so well!. Here are the pics: