Well, its about time!

I spent yesterday on Sydney Harbour, celebrating Australia Day. I even got a bit of a tan. Last week, I attended a friends wedding, and entertained some other friends that my wife invited over for dinner. It would have been rude of me to sit at the computer and ignore them. I have also been working late at my real job to catch up on some things that are a bit behind, and will still need to work late from time to time over the next couple of months, but hopefully the weddings and national holidays are over, for a while anyway.

Over the last couple of weeks, besides all of the other things that have distracted me, I have been doing a bit of research, and finishing up the Train Stop. I uploaded it to the DLS last night, but am just waiting on some last minute formalities before I release it from the preview area so that you can download it. I was so excited that I uploaded it before I had checked it properly, and ended up having to upload it again after removing some debugging code that I had left in the script.

I also realised that I should probably ask permission to modify one of Natvander's scripts. I had not thought about it since there was nothing in the license or in the script itself that said I couldn't, so I just presumed that it was ok. Then, after had I uploaded the Train Stop, my better judgement convinced me that I should at least ask, out of courtesy. I will be delaying the release. until I get this cleared up.

Last week, I also had an idea for a really quick and small model... the NSW Track Flag. It took me just a few hours to knock it out, and script it (ok... it took about 8 hours - but that included 4 hours of tearing out my hair trying to figure out TrainzScript :) The flag was uploaded a few days ago, but I currently have an update awaiting Auran approval, so if you havnt downloaded it already, you should probably wait until mid next week. If you have, download it again once the update is available.

Recently I signed up with HET (Historic Electric Traction) - probably the first of many organisations I will be supporting. They are a group of volunteers who contract their services to Railcorp, to restore and maintain Railcorp's historic fleet of electric passenger trains. They work out of the old Redfern Workshops, which is just a few blocks from here, and I hope to go down there occasionally and help them maintain the red rattlers and other historic trains that they have there. I have a bit of an alterior motive as well - I hope to get some photographs of the buildings and particularly Traverser No 1, and model them for Trainz.

A couple of other Trainz projects have shown up on the horizon. Im very interested in the Cityrail project (recreating the Sydney Cityrail network in Trainz) and have offered to help build any models that the guys might need to support that. Naturally the Tangara is going to be a part of it, but I have my eye on a few stations and buildings around the place as well.

Next week, I plan to work on the Tangara some more. I havnt done much over the last 2 weeks, and hope to make that up next week. I spotted a few glitches that will need looking at, but nothing major. I should have the gangway finished very soon, and will probably then work on the glitches. Now that the Train Stop is out of the way, I hope to finish the buffer, and start on the catenary splines and related static bits and pieces.

Oh, and my other task for this weekend, is to set up a website for Redfern Workshopz to allow me to add a few features that cant be done on this blog. More on that, as it progresses.