After spending the day looking after the wife and children who have been knocked over by Australian Flu, unsurprisingly I havent managed to get much of anything done.

That said, during their naps I have managed to get a few small jobs sorted out. The first major job was refitting an Airfix centenary with its second replacement (Comet) side, unfortunately as mentioned in my previous post the tumblehome wasn't properly formed on this pair of etches (but I only found out after cutting the gutter off both and after gluing the first in position.) On the second side I had a go at re-profiling the tumblehome before gluing in place. Unfortunately I got the worst fit at the top of any Centenary converted so far, so lots of touch up work with superglue was required. That said the model is now up to the same stage as the rest of the rake. The remaining jobs are to update the roof detail on the restaurant pair and thirds, sort out the underframe on the restaurant pair, replacing the wheels with metal ones, and finally to add a length of 10 by 60 thou strip to beef up the gutters. Once all of that is done they will be ready for painting in the spring.
I did manage to make some headway on the roofs and adding filler to doors, but there a long way to go (and no doubt given FGW number of vents on the restaurant pair I will need to order some more

The other job of the day has been a little work on DCC fitting 4547. Over the Christmas brake while visiting my parents I went through my stored model bits looking for anything useful. Soldered up to the chassis of a HO SW1001 shunted ​(re-sprayed into Foster Yeoman livery a long time ago)​ I found a very small ZTC decoder. In another box was another old decoder (I think a Bachmann 3 function that came with a job lot from the DEMU Showcase in the mid 2000s).
I have put together a basic decoder tester using components from an old school project, which is now soldered up to the test track on Brent's fiddleyard. After testing the decoder worked, it was hard wired into 4576. A very straight forward job cutting the function wires to an inch in length, then soldering wires to the motor and pickups. The decoder is then stuffed into the boiler and the model reassembled.

The other decoder (the old Bachmann/ESU job) only supports short addressing, so unless I get a model of A1 Lloyds it is of no use what so ever. Instead it has been fitted to my Great Western Trains class 47 which is used as an initial track tester.