Poolside Rails

As you recall, I’ve been working on planning the Paris Portion of the Paris-to-Peking Railway. I don’t think we’re really going to end up in Peking…the China Loop on the railway is so rural, and makes such a nice contrast to the hustle and bustle of the Paris to Be.

But this is Paris of 1910…not quite the Paris to Be but the Paris What Was. Photographs of Paris are easy to find, but most of ‘em are tres moderne, not pre-WW I Paris. Out of the blue, however, an inspiration swoops in and says “dude, I’m, like, here!”

I had a bad Friday. Wasn’t feeling well. My wife was cranky with me. I forgot our anniversary. I picked up a couple of CDs I thought she’d like, just as sort of a little “oopsie” kind of a thing. I was quickly and swiftly notified that this was unsuitable as an anniversary present. I really didn’t mean that it was supposed to be a bonified anniversary present…but, move over, Rover,there’s plenty of room in the dog house. It was a bad Friday.

Saturday the missus spent the day at her mother’s house, cleaning and cleaning and other stuff. I spent the day at our house, working on the Bachmann Not So Big Hauler and building these pretty cool shelves for the living room and hanging out with my eight year old daughter. We watched The Penguins of Madagascar and Spongebob on Nickelodeon in between our various tasks. Now it was evening, and mumsikins still hadn’t returned, which meant dinner was on dad. Not having two nickels to rub together, I cranked out a batch of macaroni and cheese with a can of tuna in it…see, The Idiot, the little black Prince Edward mix puppy, swallowed something he shouldn’t have, and it cut his throat on the inside, so he spent the whole day making a honking noise like a goose trying to barf up something that wasn’t there because he’d really just irritated his throat. I figured I’d give him the tuna juice out of the can and dose it up with olive oil to make his throat feel better. And if it made him shut up, why, I would feel better too!

So we sat down with our mac/cheese/tuna combo, which, if you haven’t tried it and are not faint of heart, isn’t bad, and put on a movie; let’s watch something old, she says, you know, on video.

As you know, I’ve been trying to get a handle on designing the Paris of 1910.

For our movie my daughter picks out Disney’s The Aristocats. Now, just take a wild guess as to where and when the film takes place…go ahead, I’ll wait. I could not believe it!

Of course you realize that the US Government sent Walt Disney and his artists on a goodwill tour of South America in the 1940’s…it was all rather hush-hush, as we were in fact trying to buy goodwill with glitz and Mickey Mouse (el raton Mickey). Disney’s cover story was that he was doing research for a new movie, which would eventually be Three Caballeros. It was pretty intensive research, involving a lot of parties and drinking.

I realize this is all a long diatribe, but there is a point; Disney did his research, because he was big on accuracy. Because he did his research, he’s done mine, too, because I’m big on lazy! Now I have a really nice reference as to what Paris of 1910 looked like! Of course it’s not a business district in the movie, but the architecture will be similar, and there’s an unmistakable feel in the film that will be great to capture on the PtoP.

You know our motto is Garden Railroading is Real Railroading. I’m not sure how a Disney movie about singing cats fits into that…I’ll let you figure that one out!

“Here, now, I tole ye I’d find it,” the Chief Engineer says proudly.

“No one said you wouldn’t,” the CEO sniffs.

“Well, I did,” the CFO says quietly.

“After all,” the PR Guy says, “it did take you an awfully long time.”

“Ye dunna ken to how difficult these things are, lad,” the Chief Engineer is uncharacteristically nice this evening. He’s only on his second stout.

I figured the short would be in the electronics in the nose of the Bachmann Not-So-Big Hauler, as when my brother and I installed the radio from the Ferrari we didn’t have a working soldering iron or any electrical tape. So we used the old twisty-wire, masking tape combo and hoped for the best. You’re not talking high voltage coming out of half a dozen D cells, so masking tape is kinda okay.

So, the plan for the day was to try out the new Weller Soldering Gun on the Bachmann and FIX THAT SHORT! Ah, the best laid plans, eh?

Now, I remember that saying as: the best laid plans are aft gang aglay…and I think we can attribute it to Robert Burns…no, not George Burns. Say goodnight, Gracie. I think that’s the quote…looking it up now because I’m curious. No, it wasn’t George, it was Robert, written in 1785, and here’s the quote: “The best-laid schemes o’ mice an ‘men/Gang aft agley”. It’s from a poem he wrote called To A Mouse, On Turning Her Up In Her Nest With the Plough. Now you know something you didn’t now before, unless you already knew that, in which case I’ll go on with the story about the Bachmann.

The nose of the NSBH is just too cramped to allow soldered joints in the wires…everything has to bend in order to fit, and I rather fear the connections will break, as, from what I’ve seen, soldered joints aren’t all that flexible. Enter Wire Nuts. These guys hang on tightly, protect against cross-connection, and just plain look cool. So I replaced all of the twisted wire/masking tape combo joins with Wire Nuts. And it looks cool!

Once I  put the thing back together I discovered, much to my horror, that the short still prevailed. She ran fine until it hit a bump, and trust me, on the Paris-to-Peking Railway you can’t go more than six inches without hitting a bump, and then she’d stop. What in heavens name?

Off came the body shell…now, on the battery-driven Bachmann Big Hauler, the aft end of the boiler has this massive snap-on door that closes the battery compartment…the batteries are stored in the boiler. This is one massive piece of plastic, and Hercules himself has been known to complain about how hard it is to get that door open.

“I have?” Hercules says from Mt. Olympus.

“Shhh, it’s just a figure of speech. It’s those mortals,” Zeus says.

The battery door is firmly attached to the body shell, not the chassis, of the NSBH. With the body shell off, there is no way to test the electricals, as that door provides the cross-connection between the battery sets. Got it? So the way to test your electricals is with a knife, making the cross-connection yourself. I did that, and, wonder of wonders, the thing ran! And I couldn’t stop it from running until I removed the knife.

Picture Edison in his early years, before he invented the electric light bulb. What popped in above his head when he had an idea? A match? A lantern? Maybe a phonograph.

Here’s the source of the short: it aint no short. There are two little screws that hold the body shell onto the chassis. Somebody put tanks on the sides of the body shell in just the right place to occlude those screws…in other words, you can’t screw the body to the chassis. As the boiler door, which provides cross-connection, is attached to the body shell, any bump causes the body to vibrate away from the chassis, and, bzzzt, no connection. There’s your short, Napoleon! Or is it; There, you’re short, Napoleon…sorry, I’m in a weird mood.

So, I screwed the body on with a nasty looking screw in the aft end, where all nasty screws should take place, and, voila, she runs like the dickens! However it is that the dickens runs…don’t have time to look that one up.

“Here, lad,” slurs the Chief Engineer, “ye’re aft gang agley!”

Sorry it’s taken so long to get to this post…goodness, time is fun when you’re having flies! Since the Dreadful Event we’ve been working on my mother-in-law’s house to get it ready for sale…painting, cleaning, moving furniture, getting stuck with the in-laws for a dinner at this shi-shi restaurant picked out for its selection of wines. I had a great chat with my eight year old over a twenty dollar pasta dish of which everybody had to have a taste so yours truly got about three forkfuls…twenty bucks just doesn’t go as far as it used to!

So, On To Paris! Although the rails on the eastern side of the Parisian Loop are, as we say in France, Not There, there is no reason why we shouldn’t start looking seriously at developing the city of Paris itself.

First off, there’s a large backdrop area available along the fence on the western side. There’s a great article in the current Garden Railways Magazine about backdrops. In it the author talks about building faux rocks and mountain ranges up against a fence, but also uses a startlingly realistic photograph of distant mountains to great effect. My only problem with photographs outside, of course, is old Mr. Sunshine, who fades even the prettiest rose…when I was twenty-three I had a whoppin’ affair with a woman who was forty. Now I’m fifty five, which makes her…gasp…seventy-two. Safe to say the blush is off that rose. Way, way off.

My plan is to lay a nice sky blue/white blend down a plywood backdrop and plaster it with layers of false building fronts, probably of that mysterious blue foam. I have combed my local Lowe’s, but there is no blue foam to be had, only the white Popcorn variety.

The resulting background thingy should be about six inches thick, which will add a huge amount of texture to the background. Of course there will be lights in it, too, and that will help give the sense of a large city back there.

One of the biggest hassles we face in Paris is that stupid stump of a mimosa tree. I have cut that thing down three times but never quite got to the root structure. I’m certain the scientific name for the mimosa tree is hellplanticus nokiddingus. I have never in my life seen a nastier, more evil, more management-resistant plant in my life!

So, here’s the plan, and I think you’ll like it: we’ll build around it. Box it in a building, perhaps, or disguise it some other way so that passers by won’t say “my, what an ugly stump!” There’s a great article I saw in Model Railroader last year about disguising posts in your basement with tall buildings…you look at the building and forget that you’re looking at a post. We’ll work up some sort of a treatment for Mr. Mimosa.

I’ve decided not to worry about the rails…for one thing, I’ve planned the Parisian Station to be, well, stationed right in that section of track that is currently lacking in the track department. Why not build city-style rails there, you know, with concrete forming the railway rather than brass rails? Since we’re battery powered there’s no reason not to…unless we rethink electrification. Can you spell Functioning Overheads?

Now, I’ve come to realize that most of these most recent posts have been filled with whining; whining about the rain, whining about the dogs, whining about the fact that I’ve been whining.

Well, here we are, a brand new day, and by George I don’t have anything to whine about! In fact, things are sort of looking up, sort of.

That rainstorm, a whole week of rain it was, inches and inches coming down so fast it overwhelmed the swimming pool drains and caused her to overflow her banks…that rainstorm did nothing, zippo, nada, to the Paris to Peking Railway!

Oh, sure stuff got wet. But there were no catastrophic mudslides, no failed retaining walls, no vast yawning caverns opening under the rails. Even my power lines stayed up!

What’s more, as the rain caused us to focus on our indoor selves (using our indoor voices, we reminded our cooped-up eight year old), yours truly was forced to buy himself a new soldering iron – a cool Weller gun-shaped jobby with a gazillion little tips and stuff.

My brother gave me a Cold Heat cordless solderer a couple of Christmases ago. He used it during the installation of the radio in the Bachmann Not-So-Big Hauler and found it to be quite useless. I failed to advise him that I had used the thing extensively in trying to solder a piece of jumper wire to a rail. Here’s a news flash:  Garden Railway Rails Discovered to be World’s Largest Heatsink. I may have burned the little guy up trying to heat about fifty feet of brass rail on two AA batteries! I replace the batteries, but I don’t think the Cold Heat soldering iron has ever forgiven me!

So now I have this nifty Weller Solderin’ Arn, and it’s pretty cool. I can hardly wait to go solder something.

Maybe I’ll use it to fix the horn in my trusty old Isuzu Rodeo. Bad enough it sounds like a clown car horn, now it’s taken to beeping whenever I go over a bump. This morning the darn thing started blaring at exactly the same moment some guy was diving in to cut me off! He jammed on his breaks and let me go by…thank you, o bumpy road and ever-prescient clown-car horn!

“Here, now, what’s this?” the Chief Engineer grumbles in his thick Scottish brogue. “This dunna baffle me a’tall!”

“Well,” the PR Guy says, “be that as it may, it makes a much better story than ‘Garden Railway Chief Engineer Says Oh, I Get It’!”

“What baffles me is why ye still have a job!” The Chief Engineer goes back to his stout.

The Bachmann Not-So-Big Hauler ran great, forwards and backwards (unlike the locomotive in Polar Express that could be driven from side to side…it’s not a question of how they did it, but why you would need that in a locomotive). The NSBH responded nicely to the radio control. It was, in a word, cool.

And then, one fine winter’s day, it quit working. Well, those six D cells have been in there for a long, long time. Fresh Duracells (bing, bing BING) produced exactly the same result: nothin’. Well, that 9 volt sucker in the transmitter has been in there for a long, long time.  A fresh Duracell 9-volt (bing, bing BING) produced exactly the same result: still nothin’.The little headlight turned on and off only sporadically when commanded from the remote. Hmmm, something’s fishy. What IS it?

“Ye’ve got a short, y’idiot!” bellows the Chief Engineer. As if I didn’t know that.

Well, that was a fine winter’s day about a week ago. I decided to back-burner the thing because some other tragedy had befallen the household…I believe it was the Dreaded Event. Then came the rains, and the puttin’ up of the hardware before the storm of the century.

Just for giggles and grins, I snapped on the transmitter and pushed the throttle.

Now, you have to understand, I’ve spray-painted the crackers out of this locomotive. I’ve been trying to eliminate the Bachmann Big Hauler look from it, with all those gaily painted wheels and stuff, and I’ve blasted it pretty heavily with Rust-Oleum. Brown was the first color of choice. Then I nailed it with black to make the various new bits and pieces look merged together.  I haven’t quite gotten around to cleaning up the running gear on it yet, so when it runs, it has a lot of Rust-Oleum-Resistance to overcome.

But, it ran. Sure, it groaned and squeaked, but it ran! The headlight blinked on and off relative to commands from the remote. The thing trundled down the track toward the Kazakhstani Bridge, pushing the Troublesome Trucks before it. It came back…

Well, it came part of the way back. It got next to the cypress tree and decided to not run anymore. I thought perhaps we’d burned out the radio…it was designed to be powered by two AA’s, not six D’s.  But the light still responded to my commands (radio, not verbal).

And then there was a cool wind with a hint of moisture in it, and I knew I had to move my tail to get the thing out of the elements. I switched the batteries off in the locomotive, verified by the light no longer responding to the remote control, and parked ‘er in the train cabinet (the one I carelessly built over the outlet that houses both black widows and the GFI button).

Strange, huh? Dr. Voltmeter will have to take a look at our continuity when the rain lets up.

“Now, that dunna make no sense at all,” the Chief Engineer mutters.

I bought this cool little device for five bucks on the after-Christmas-closeout aisle at CVS Pharmacy. Fifty percent off, and batteries included…how cool could that be? Part clock, part hygrometer, part calendar, part weather glass…it’s the cat’s pajamas, I can tell you!

My oldest daughter sighs and says “dad’s toys.” My younger daughter looks at it and says  “it’s just a clock!” My wife looks at it and shakes her head. “It’s your five dollars.”

Well, the little picture at the top of the thingie shows rain clouds…the outlines of clouds with little dashed lines pointing down that looks like digital rain. My brother tells me “oh yeah, this is a big one. Expecting four inches here in Ventura, twenty up in the mountains.” Four Inches? It’s a flood!

Knowing how just that sprinkle last week created chaos, I had to step into EMERGENCY GEAR to get the railway ready to meet this devastating monsoon!

Target #1: all rolling stock inside.  That means the troublesome trucks, and all the GI Joe guys lying inside ‘em. That means the Bachmann Not-So-Big-Hauler and its remote. AND that means the funky tinplate stationary locomotive given to me by my younger sister at Christmas. It’s pretty cool looking; it’s a slightly undersized American with an insanely wide track; those folks in India got the look right but the dimensions all wrong! Anyway, that thing came in, too.

Target #2: all tools inside.  I’ve been working on the railroad, most of the livelong day! And I’m a slob! So, time to go find those three pair of needlenose pliers, the Linesman’s Pliers, the steel rulers, the hand brush, the measuring tape, the voltmeter, the fourteen Phillips screwdrivers and ten slotteds, and all the other stuff I toted from one corner of the yard to the other to work on the track, the cars, or the landscape, and tote ‘em all back into the garage. I had wondered why I didn’t have any screwdrivers out there!

Now it’s all clean, and all quiet. All quiet before the storm…the storm of the CENTURY! Well, okay, the first storm of the second decade of the century. Loses a little something, there…

Here in Southern California we’re affected by the El Niño system. I had been considering writing a piece about the El Niño and its impact on garden railroading, but everybody kept predicting a week system. How embarrassing to write a piece about a predicted fierce storm, only to find out it’s a wiener.

Well, BRING IT ON, my friend! We’re ready. I’ve hosed away the mud from that part of the China Curve where the track was lifted,  only to find that someone, probably me, has stepped gleefully and forcefully upon rails that were not anchored to the ground. Boom goes the gauge, crack goes those little lugs that hold the ties to the rails, and sproing, one rail goes up, the other down. Heck with it! Let the mud come! This is WAR! Well, anyway, it’s a rainstorm.

As you know, Garden Railroading is Real Railroading. Just like the big fellas, we have to be good stewards of our rolling stock and equipment. And I do believe that this may very well be the first real rain we’ve seen in years!

Now that we’re in the New Year, we need to consider new options, new ways of doing things. New designs, new ideas. Let’s move forward, shall we?

As you know, we had the Dreadful Event on Saturday last…the cremated remains came home today in a little gray plastic box. Of course we had to look…it’s not grisly in the least, but something in that ashes-to-ashes thing got to me, and here I am back in the garage hiding…I mean, writing this post.

Anyway, that was Saturday. Sunday we took a trip down to Chinatown in downtown Los Angeles to take our minds off of our troubles. If you’ve never been to the LA Chinatown, then you’ve missed something pretty cool. You have to be in the mood for Chinatown, and, Mister, that mood was there.

There’s a really cool store down there called Wing Hop Fung…it’s kind of like a miniature Walmart except you can’t buy tires or wedding dresses, but, man, they have just about everything else. Well, everything else in the housewares, tea, pre-packaged foods, and fascinating Chinese objet d’art sort of stuff.  They have this horse…the thing is about twelve hundred bucks,  is about the size of big dog, and is simply astounding to look at. It’s made of cast resin, and, somehow, the artist was able to weave a huge number of different colors within the casting…eh, you had to be there. I looked in my wallet – sorry, no $1200 today. Maybe tomorrow.

We were goofing around looking at stuff, and my daughter pointed out this model pagoda. Okay, think of a model pagoda: Sits on your desktop, gets dusty, goes in the trash, right? Ehhhh, wrong answer! This sucker stands a good eight feet tall.

Now, my daughter just lost her best friend. Many’s the time we’d hear voices in Grandma’s room while we were up responding to Nature’s call in the wee small hours of the morning (wee small hours, get it?). Our little one would be sitting in bed with Grandma, and the two of them would be laughing about God only knows what.  On the day of the Dreadful Event she sat with her mother, aunt and I in Grandma’s room and laughed and reminisced about the great lady whose remains still lay in the bed. After a while the little one told us Grandma was getting a little creepy, as she was turning blue. Not long after that the mortuary guys came and toted her away.

Anyway, this spunky little kid says “Look, Daddy, that would go great on our railroad!” What an amazing little person! Moreover, she was right! Looking at the doorways and walkways, my goodness if it didn’t look like it was right around that 1/18th scale mark!

So, I took a couple of shots…fuzzy, yes, crummy, yes, hard…what is this, Bag on Bill day?

Knowing what we know about BLUE Styrofoam, not the white, chippy stuff I bought but the densely packed blue insulation foam, a structure like that would be a piece of cake! The lightness of the foam means you don’t have to worry about structural weight…if you built a simple dowel structure down the center it would undoubtedly stand straight for just about forever! And that densely packed foam should hold the details rather well.

I’ll let you know as soon as I get my hands on the blue ‘foam…the good stuff!

I been thinking about that horse…too small to ride, too expensive to put in the closet, too…Chinesy?…to put on top of the piano. Maybe it looks best in the Wing Hop Fung!

Many is the time we’ve said that Garden Railroading is Real Railroading. I believe it’s safe to say that the analogy goes forward into other aspects of the garden railroader’s life. If it happens to the railroader it must somehow affect the railroad, too.

Mother-in-law Marjorie passed away this past Saturday.  She was a resident here at the Turner residence, a loved and respected member of the household.  Her bright and effervescent spirit will be deeply missed.  She was the life of the party, the fun of the game, and a great joy to be around.

She came to live with us nearly four years ago for what was to be a short visit while she recuperated from a recent hospital stay. My wife and I moved into the garage, yielding up the master bedroom so that she would be more comfortable.

Our offices are out here, now, too, and we’ve rather made an adjustment to this accommodative lifestyle. Even my workbench is out here. Until Saturday, so was our bed! Cold? You betchum, but we didn’t mind.

My wife and I moved immediately back into the house in order to provide a comforting presence for our eight year old daughter, who lost her top-of-the-A-List  best friend.

Marjorie almost made it to ’91. When she was a little girl, refrigerators had yet to be invented. McDonald’s, even Disney, were just glimmers in people’s eyes. Her world was a quieter place – that’s for sure! She lost her parents early in her life, and her growing up wasn’t easy.

She eventually married Ed, an underage recruit in the U.S. Army who named his mule Margie after his best girl when he was serving in Panama. After they married the military took them all over the world, although, oddly enough, they ended up in Lancaster, California.  She saw times and places at which one can only marvel.  Her husband knew Chuck Yeager personally.  That story about the bear? That’s his story….if you look under  the post called “Birthday Bash Beleaguers Railway Reporting” you’ll see it.

Anyway, the point is that we’ll sorely miss Miss Margie. She brought a terrific life to the household, and her loss is keenly felt here in the Turner homestead. She was a terrific, terrific person, and if you didn’t get the chance to know her, you have really missed something special.

“Gentlemen,” the CEO stands at his chair in the posh Club Room at the luxurious Hotel Americain in Paris, “this is a momentous occasion…an epic occasion.”

“What,” mutters the Chief Engineer who looks oddly like a penguin in his tuxedo, “ha’ ye changed yer socks?”

The room bursts into wild laughter as all of the board members and senior shareholders  clap one another on the back and yell “huzzah!”

“No, no, you simpletons!” the PR Guy leaps to his feet. “This is the 100th Post on the Paris to Peking Railway!”

The room bursts into thunderous applause and even more “huzzahs”.

“Thank you, thank you very much,” the PR Guy blushes and sits down.

“I don’t believe the applause is for you,” the still standing CEO says.

“Oh, of course.” The PR Guy blushes even more deeply.

“The Railway is moving to an important new phase,” the CEO continues. “Where we were in a test and trial mode, trying theories and testing ideas, we are now moving into the production phase…putting it all together to build the railway and get it fully operational.”

“What?!?” the Chief Engineer sputters into his stout.

“But first,” the CEO continues, “let us look at the theories and tests we’ve conducted in these 100 posts:
-Converting the long wheelbase western profile Bachmann Big Hauler 4-6-0 locomotive to a short wheelbase Not-So-Big Hauler 4-4-0 with a European tank engine profile;
-Using the remote control from an inexpensive RC car as a remote unit for a locomotive;
-Building robust structures from insulation Styrofoam;
-Using simple 26 gauge and dowels to model a functional overhead power grid;
-Slicing and dicing the Pola railway station to create a large, open-backed flat structure;
-Testing an finding appropriate retaining wall materials;
-Using inexpensive miniature Christmas lights as a source for structure and street lights;
-Testing the interaction between rail quality and locomotive design;
-and, finally, creating fine looking woodwork with craft and popsicle sticks!

“The list is impressive, my friends, but nothing compared to what comes next! Next we will see …
-Completion of the rails themselves, and complete electrical connection from P to Shining P;
-The rise of the magnificent city of Paris, glittering with electrical lights, from what is now a festered miasma of railway detritus;
-The replacement of the out of scale trestles with  fine stone edifices carved from stacked Styrofoam layers;
-The forestation of the China Section;
-People, animals, and every manner of realistic flora and fauna the hardy traveler can expect to see between Paris and Peking;
-and the development of the finest fleet of rolling stock one can imagine!”

The room bursts into wild applause, and the air is filled with cheers.

Well, I’ve got my work cut out for me! The time has come to quit goofing around testing ideas and start applying them. I believe that’s what you’re going to see in the next 100 posts.

Thank you for riding with us so far along the Paris to Peking Railway. We’ve enjoyed sharing these 100 posts with you, and can only promise even more fun in the next 100 to come!

“I’ll believe I’ll be having another stout,” the Chief Engineer mutters.

Remember that story about the grasshopper and the ant? You know, the ant works his keester off while the grasshopper goofs around, hopping over grass. Then the winter comes, and the grasshopper needs shoes or something like that. I forget how it goes. Really, who cares?

Anyway, the point is that winter has descended on the Paris to Peking Railway.  Mind you, winter in Southern California isn’t quite like winter in Nebraska or Maine, but it does pose challenges to us garden railroaders.  Rains fall, winds blow, and the days are shorter and colder. And the mud flows.

I ran the Bachmann Not-So-Big Hauler 4-4-0 Tank locomotive…I know what you’re thinking: it runs? Yep. It runs pretty good. Well, that’s an overstatement.  Fact is, the darn thing wheezes and squeaks more like an army tank than a precision piece of engineering. I think the problem is that some idiot spray painted the running gear black and hasn’t lubed a darn thing.

Anyway, the point is that I ran the Bachmann NSBH across the strikingly unrealistic bridge in the China Section…fortunately, the bridge is finally starting to fall apart. There’s a great article in this month’s Garden Railroading Magazine about building a bridge out of Styrofoam by stacking up layers of foam – ninety degrees different than how I built my people bridge. As soon as I get my nerve up, some blue foam, and a bunch of free weekend hours, I’m going to replace that cruddy wooden trestle that spans a scale 108 foot gap with no center support and is alive with termites.

Anyway, the point is that I got the Bachmann NSBH across the bridge and around the first leg of the China Curve when the thing threw itself off the rails. Now, it was dark, and I was pushing the two LGB passenger cars directly rather than through the couplers because I hadn’t yet  replaced the coupler on the NSBH.

By the way, the Bachmann NSBH coupler replacement was a piece of cake. I had an extra hoop from a different piece of rolling stock. Now, this sounds really stupid, but I built a hutch for my eight year olds’ 4H rabbit project: well, actually the project’s name is Gersham and he’s a lop, or slop, or something like that.  That hutch took up all of my nut and bolt sets. When I finally got around to replacing the coupler, I had no nut/bolt combo with which to accomplish the task.  Instead I connected some cotter pins together to hold the hoop in place. It seems to work.

Anyway, the point is that the track down there in the China Section has lifted off the roadbed due to an insidious flow of mud from the recently planted China Hill.  It was a mountain for awhile, but the landscaping effort reduced the lofty heights down to knollish lumps.

When the sun came up on Sunday, after we’d taken the dogs for a hike along the Goleta Slough and I’d run out of nuts on the hutch and it was now late in the afternoon, I decided to take a gander at my China Curve. I believe these pictures rather tell the story.  Next Saturday, or probably Sunday, or possibly the weekend after, I’ll get the hose out and clear the floe, reseat the track, and figure out some degree of a retaining wall.

But it’ll be tough, because it rains, the mud flows, and it gets dark early.  That’s winter for you! There! That’s the point!