The February 2008 Rail Heritage newsletter is now available here: https://wamrc.org.au/rail-heritage/newsletters/2008/Feb2008.pdf
Rail Heritage Newsletter — Feb 2008
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Irv Woolley’s Farewell
It was with sad regret that we said “farewell” to member Irv Woolley at the general meeting held on the 23rd January 2008. Irv has been a member at the club for nearly three years, joining the club shortly after emigrating to Australia from the UK. In that time he has proven himself to be enthusiastic and a valuable member of the club and committee, but sadly he is now moving back to the UK for personal reasons. Although he plans to remain an outreach member of the club and will still drop in whenever he is back in Perth, obviously it will be a while before we see him again.
All the best Irv, and we hope the rain in England doesn’t get you down too much!
Here are some more pictures from his last meal at the “West Australian Model Railway Gentlemen’s Club”:
WAMRC Air Conditioned
The WAMRC main layout room is now air conditioned with two powerful evaporative air conditioning units, courtesy of a $6,600 grant from Lotterywest. They were commissioned on the 22nd January 2008 in the middle of a heatwave, and the immediate difference they have made to the club rooms is truly incredible!
Great thanks go to Mark Butler and Paul Heaney for preparing the grant application, completing all the paperwork, getting numerous quotes and arranging the actual installation. And of course, huge thanks got to Lotterywest for supporting the club financially in this way!
There was some initial concern about how the air-conditioners had been wired into the club’s main power switchboard, and whether our routine practice of the last person out turning off main power as they leave was going to interfere with the normal shutdown operation of the air-conditioning units — or whether they could be inadvertently left on. So we conducted some simple experiments and also contacted the manufacturer (Jarrahdale) to get some answers.
It turns out the air-conditioners are wired into the switched master circuit of the club — when you turn the master switch off as you leave, power is cut to the air-conditioners as well. This is a good thing as it means the air-conditioners can’t be accidentally left on!
The air-conditioners automatically drain their water (about 10–12 litres) when they lose power (in other words they require power to hold their water during normal operation), although a pressure relief valve in the system means that it can take up to a minute after power is lost before water actually begins to drain. There is nothing in the design of the air-conditioners or controllers that means turning the power off abruptly is necessarily worse than turning them off at the controller (the service guy I spoke to says that is routinely what he does when servicing them), but even so, for normal operation he does recommend turning it off at the controller first.
The air conditioners hold their water for about 5 minutes after being turned off at the controller. So he suggests as a general rule of thumb we should aim to turn them off at the controllers about 10 minutes before the last person leaves the club and the power is switched off — but if that doesn’t happen and the power is just switched off at the master switch while the air-conditioners are still on it will still be OK — the units will still drain their water even without power.
Below are some more pictures of the installation. Click on any thumbnail to view the picture.
Web Site Renovated
Welcome to the new look WAMRC web site! We have been carrying out some pretty extensive renovations in the background over the past few months, and the change of the home page marks the culmination of that work.
Most of the changes are behind the scenes (read more below if you are interested in the technical details), but one of the most obvious changes is the addition of a dynamic news “blog” on the home page. This will not only be used to provide a log of updates on what has changed in the web site (such as this entry), but also to provide updates of current news and activities at the club. Another noticeable change is the use of embedded Google Maps on the new About page, which now incorporates the information that used to be held on both the old home page and the visitors page.
Behind the scenes, the site has been totally updated to get rid of the old-style table based formatting — now all pages are laid out using divisions and cascading style sheets (CSS) position specifications. This not only makes the site faster to load (as the pages are physically smaller), but also means they are now more accessible to people using screen reading software. As a bonus, when printing pages from the web site, they no longer waste a third of the page on the left hand side as the navigation menu only shows up when viewing it on the screen, not in print.
We hope you enjoy the new look web site — and remember you can even provide feedback and comments by clicking on the “comments” link below each entry in this blog!
Image: Public HO Display Layout at the WAMRC