You dirty rat………

Well what started off with a war on the rat in the ceiling some time ago (I eventually won that war with Ratsak) was lost this week when I also had Mother Nature plotting against me.

The rats had decided that between the gyprock and the corrugated iron roof it would be a good place to set up home. Who could blame them, plenty of fiberglass insulation (3.5R at that) and they had a dream home. If they hadn’t been so stupid and scratched around up there when I was down below, I may never known they were there. Thats how dumb they were.

After many packets of Ratsak, I eventually found the dried out remains of a rat some distance from the shed. I suspected it was the ‘railway rat’. Good all gone.

So after many more trains had circled the layout without that annoying scratching sound above I thought “ beauty I’ve beaten you buggers”. But I think they had the last laugh.

After a while slowly at first an amazing fungal growth had appeared on the ceiling where the rats abode was. What the heck I said, stuff it I’ll paint over it and that will be that. But no, the fungal growth grew back and started growing.

It was something David Attenborough could have done a documentary on. It had many colours and different shapes, quite pretty some of it.

Shite, there must be more to this, the rats gone so where was this coming from. And as we all know the east coast has had its good share of rain recently. I alluded to this problem in the last post about the water and after closing the door last Sunday night a small crack had appeared.

Well I opened the door today and was greeted with this:

The water which had found its way in yet again had combined with the previous residents bowel wastes and had come crashing down on the floor and layout. I was most disgusted to find out that rats are too lazy to go and do their toiletries outside. Its not as if they had far to go. No more than a metre and what a nice smelling house they could of had instead of one that smelt like a dunny.

As can be seen from the shot below my favourite seat had copped some of the fallout and thankfully the controller (more importantly the controller knob) was missed completely. I’ll never be the same again on that seat.

Now the real scary bit when I opened the door was when I saw a bit of gyprock dangling down just like a guilloutine blade ready to cut my son’s only loco NR23 in half or worse. It was Murphys law, it just happened to be down at Batemans Bay when it nearly become history.

Well most of the floor mess has been cleaned up and tomorrow I am going to try and clean the rest of the roof up. It will mean cutting it out and replacing with more gyprock, painting and generally wasting more modelling time.

I went up onto the roof also today armed with a tin of black gooey stuff and yet again have gone over all the possible places I can think of that the water is getting in. I’ll need reinforcing up there to carry the weight of it all.

Anyhow thats the bad news for today, the good news is that Manly finally won another football match tonight and Monday I’ll go down to the Epping Model railway exhibition.

I’ll leave the final word for the boys from Bega loco who came across the rubble before I had had a chance to clean it up.