Poolside Rails

Well, maybe housing is not a crisis, but it’s a big problem in the China Section. Imagine you’re on the Paris to Peking Railway. You rattle your way out of Paris, heading towards China. You pass through the Ukraine…you know because there are two buildings there that look kind of European, and therefore must be Ukrainian. You get through the rugged Kazakhstan and find yourself in China. But how do you know?

My seven year old and I discovered the perfect spot for another structure. It’s a place where the original builder’s potato-sized, cemented-down ballast gets a little out of hand and stretches a good foot beyond the edge of the railway. It looks pretty bad, and, for as long as I can remember, has been a pain in the tuckus to deal with scenically. She looks at it and says “daddy, we should put a Chinese house there.”

Out of the mouth of babes, huh? The plan suddenly became clear: I have a pile of junk plywood that is IDEAL for hacking into house shapes. I have a place in need of a house shape…fold tab A into slot B and you’re done!

The challenge has been to find what a Chinese house looks like. Remember, we’re modeling 1910, not modern China. The Internet is a marvelous research tool, and you can find a gazillion pictures of Chinese houses…but not ONE that can be easily modeled. The emphasis must be on the word Easy.

The traditional style house has those interesting peaked eaves that rise away from the walls of the house. Between the peak and the house there’s an ornately carved panel that is often horizontally curved. The roof ridge curves between the peak and the roof’s center line. I imagine it was difficult to build in 1/1 scale. I can’t imagine the complexity of doing it once for each corner, and having them all match, in plywood, in 1/18 scale. Tiling the roof, as they were most often tiled, wouldn’t be a problem, but building the structure of the roof out of plywood seems almost impossible as it’s a study in compound curves.

So, your traditional Chinese house hits the skids. Goodbye. But wait, the train skirts the southern side of the Himalayas as it enters China’s western border. What about Tibet? I’m not putting a yurt there because it would be too small. But a Tibetan house…hmmm.

I like the simple design of the Tibetan house, with its square walls and flat roof. And I like the in-cut alcove on the flat roof. That little structure up there makes the house looks foreign and exotic. I think I could build one of those babies out of plywood.

But does it look “Chinese-y”? I know my daughter won’t go for it, even though I believe the Tibetan house to be more geographically correct that a classic Chinese house. My wife wants a Chinese palace on the hill above this structure, which means the two have to be visually compatible. But that brick Chinese palace might work, and that’s not too far from the Tibetan house.

It will take some selling, but I think we’ve settled on our house! Now, to design that sucker…

Be gone, o Darkness! Stay back, ye night! The wizardry of electrical lights has come to the Ukraine!

Okay, so I have to admit I had two really big surprises on this streetlight project; the first was when I nearly electrocuted myself, the second came when I actually shot the picture above. More on that in a moment.

Just for giggles and grins I decided to try my hand at building streetlights. I had been thinking about the railway and how forlorn the China Section looked after the attack by the rabid idiot. I was really tired, and it was really hot, and I just plain didn’t feel like doing the many, many chores I had to do around here.

The upright, or standard as we say in the lighting biz, is an eight inch long piece of 1/4″x 1/4″ wood I bought at Michael’s some time ago for the combine project, which, by the way, has yet to see the light of day. I made the two inch long arm out of the same wood. I drilled a nice hole through the back of the light post and into the end of the arm and then drove a ½ inch nail in there, gluing the two pieces together with Plumber’s Goop first. Then I laid the thing down and cut a brace out of a coffee stir stick. I applied it with the same combo of ½ inch nail and Plumber’s Goop, making sure to drill pilot holes for the nails and cutting the nails in half so they wouldn’t poke through the other side of the pole. Found that out the hard way on the first nail. Oops.

As you may recall (bless you if you do!), I wrote a post back in early July about cutting up cheapo Christmas light sets to use them on the garden railway. I had a mangled set that I had used for that article still kicking around, and I cut a bulb and socket combo out of it, making sure I had at least ten inches of wire dangling off the end.

Getting the light socket onto the arm proved a little more difficult. I drilled a little hole in the back edge of the socket and matched it with a little hole drilled vertically through the end of the arm, planning to stick a small screw in there. Two problems: no little screw, and what the heck to do with the stiff wires coming out of the back of the socket. It occurred to me to try and stuff one of the wires through the little hole I’d drilled. The wire obviously wouldn’t fit through the hole, so I drilled it out to a larger diameter, and, while I was at it, drilled a second hole just inboard from the first for the other wire. With the wires poked through the two holes the socket snugged nicely up against the end of the arm. Voila!

I grabbed a coil of wire from my garage workshop, planning to make a nice little wrap around the wire and the arm to hold the wire down and make it look nice. It turned out to be 18 gauge wire…sonny, you aint gonna wrap that around a 1/4 x 1/4 square and have it look any good at all!

In messing with the wire I found that I could make a pretty good staple by bending it in a “c” shape around the jaw of my needle nose pliers and whacking it with a hammer. The staple straddles the wire and clamps into the wood…very nice! I did one of those on top of the arm and then ran the wires down the back of the post, stapling them about every inch of the way.

I cut the lampshade from a Safeway Black Cherry soda can, using a Dremel metal-cutting blade as a circle template. I marked the center and cut a ¼ inch hole in it and cut along the radius from there to the outside edge. The shade fit around the bulb but was flat, so I drew one edge of the shade over the other to lend an angle to it. It looked pretty good. I glued it together with Plumber’s Goop, but cut just the tiniest tab in the overlapping section and folded it over to keep the glued pieces from shifting.

Well, it looked like heck. Blonde wood, white wires held down with silver staples, and pictures of cherries on the lampshade! A quick blast from the Rust-Oleum brown can and, voila, a streetlight!

“Are you sure you want to do that?” my older daughter asked, watching me wire the streetlight into the mangled Christmas light set.

“It’ll be fine…I know what I’m doing.” Poor daddy, dumb as a doorknob.

My mother-in-law and wife were in the kitchen when I plugged it in.

ZZZZZZZZZ-PAP!

I jerked the plug out the wall, watching the blue spark follow the plug! The bulb was all silver inside. My wife giggled while my mother-in-law stared at me in horror. Maybe that light set has just a little too much manglement in it after all!

A big screw holds the streetlight, with its new bulb, firmly to the station platform. Two smaller holes allow the wires to drop through the platform without fuss. I wired the light to the AC side of the LGB transformer because I wasn’t sure how it would work on the DC side. I gently turned the power up. It worked just fine.

My wife and I took our younger daughter down to the Griffith Park Observatory this afternoon. Although an excellent place, it was hotter than a two dollar pistol, and it was dark by the time we got home. I rushed outside to snap the picture above, but had put the transformer away. Fumbling in the dark with a flashlight and recalcitrant wires, I was certain I wired the streetlight to the AC side. I was quite surprised to see the light wink on when I plugged the transformer in! I looked at the transformer – I had wired the light to the DC side. You can see the nice amber glow in the picture above.

So, what did I learn? Cheapo Christmas light sets are a great source for light sockets and bulbs and wiring, but shouldn’t be used as the source for power. You can wire ‘em right to the DC terminal and not worry about a thing. I imagine one could wire a bunch of them in parallel and be just fine – again, that nice amber glow is great!

Darkness be gone! Streetlight(s) have finally come to the Paris to Peking Railway! Huzzah!

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Progress is coming along nicely on the locomotive conversion. I have the cab windows blocked in with sheet styrene. I have the forward windows cut and the left windows marked for cutting.

“So,” coughs the CEO of the Paris to Peking Railway, “how are things on the railway?”

The Chief Engineer hangs his head and doesn’t reply.

“Well,” the PR Guy fidgets with his brandy snifter, “it’s like this. We were all gung ho about the locomotive conversion…”

“…and the station buildings,” the Chief Engineer interjects without looking up.

“…and the station buildings, and sorting out the wiring on the Parisian Curve…”

“…and planking those platforms and filling up the ruddy swimmin’ pool,” the Chief Engineer prounces the word pool “pyool”, causing a brief smile on the face of the CEO, who has a fondness for his Scottish friend.

“…and, well, we just sort of forgot about the China Section…” The PR guy’s voice trails off.
“FORGOT?” The CEO roars, “FORGOT?!? HOW on God’s Green Earth could ANYONE FORGET about a railway?”

“Just for the record,” mutters the CFO, softly, “this did happen at least once before…”
The boardroom erupts in pandemonium.

It’s true. Between the various building projects and the new job, I simply haven’t had the time to visit the China Section.

What a mess! The Terror, the Idiot, Zorro the Maniac, has completely buried the rails in the China Section! I blame the dog, of course, but I blame myself, too. I haven’t pushed the Landscaping Manager hard enough on getting that hill protected.

“Aye,” the Chief Engineer raises his head, “do ya no ken that landscaping equals protet-yun from yon wee small doggy?”

Yes, well, whatever he said. Until we get that mountain in the China Section planted the bare dirt is like a magnet for that canine monster.

I had this quasi-brilliant idea this afternoon…did I mention it’s hot? It’s like a gazillion degrees out there right now, and the sun is down!…anyway, the idea was to drill holes through the logs I’m using as retaining walls and stake them into the ground. I know, I know, if you’ve ever seen anyone use railroad ties in their backyard you know that they most often stake them down. But give me a break, I thought of this all by myself, and I’m not a landscaper, and I don’t have any real railroad ties in my backyard!

So, that’s the new plan. Forget about gay Paree for the moment and get our trowel and brushes back to the China Section post haste that we might restore some degree of operations down there. The weekend is just ahead…perhaps I can persuade the Landscape Manager that THIS is the weekend to plant, now that all the digging has been done for us!

Mind you, I’d plant the mountain myself, but this is the joint part of the process…you know, if everyone does a part of the job, everyone has buy in. My little girl has decorated the station, although she’s already off to something new. If my wonderful wife has a hand in planting the mountain perhaps her interest will grow, too.

I can only tell you this: the Idiot shows far more interest in the railroad than any of us!

“Say,” pipes up the PR guy. “Do any of you guys know the difference between pea soup and roast beef?”

“I dunna ken,” responds the Chief Engineer, expecting the worst.

“Duh, anyone can roast beef!” the PR guy roars. The room explodes in gales of laughter.

“See here,” the CEO sighs, wiping the tears from his eyes, “meeting adjourned!”

All right, now, enough birthday talk, back to work. Just so you know, there weren’t any pictures with yesterday’s post for two reasons; my wife is terribly camera shy, and I made the post from my Blackberry. Just like President Obama!

I had designed, and my brother fixed and modified in Photoshop, large oval windows, two each on each side of the Bachmann Not-So-Big Hauler, the 4-6-0 that I quasi-successfully modified down to a 4-4-0. It looks mighty nice on paper, well, a digital image on a monitor, anyway.

In looking at it, however, it’s really difficult to get that graceful French curve (draftsmen out there are allowed to snicker) that makes the windows look so…well, French!

I carefully cut a slip of paper to make a template in the same fashion as for the front windows. But these side windows need to be so much more elegant, more elliptical, to capture the essence of Frenchy-ness, that I’m not sure how good this will look.

The piece of paper didn’t snuggle down as nicely on the side of the locomotive as it did on the front because I didn’t shave off the window frame from the side windows. I don’t think of it as laziness that keeps me from doing the necessary steps, I think of it as “economy of motion”. Here’s my thinking: why go through the hassle of shaving off the molded on window frame before I cut the windows? If I do that, I’ll have to sand the side of the cab twice – once for the windowsill and once to smooth out the windows. Why not do it once? Well, now I know.

As before, I cut a rectangular piece of paper to match the size of the windows I plan to install. I folded it once lengthwise and once widthwise, so that I had a nifty little wad of paper. Using sharp scissors…believe me, they are the only thing around here that’s sharp!…I cut what I figured was a smooth French-like curve from one corner of the folded paper to the other, making sure, of course, not to cut the spine of the fold, only the outer edges. Once the cut was done I unfolded the paper and, voila (that’s French for TA DA!), I had a nice ellipse.

I used a glue stick to smootch the template to the side of the cab. Covering the other half of the cab with a piece of paper, I blasted it with my Rust-Oleum purple paint. Then I un-smootched the template and stuck it on the unpainted half of the cab, covered the first half with the paper, and blasted it again.

The result? Well, not what I wanted. Well, maybe it is. The cab was painted Rust-Oleum brown, but I cut away the windows and filled in the space with white plastic. Once I oversprayed it with purple Rust-Oleum, I’m afraid it looks like a pair of sick Easter eggs…no so very elegant, I’m afraid.

And then, insult to injury, I was in a rush to clean up my mess, so I threw away the piece of paper I used to cover the cab…rolled it into a ball and tossed it in the recycle bin. Before I rolled it up, of course, I carefully removed my window template and stuck it to it so I wouldn’t lose it. Oops!

Once the windows are cut on the left side, I’ll trace them onto a NEW piece of paper and use that as the template for the right side. Goodness, this is all so complex!

We, my brother and I, had designed in this nice looking curve at the trailing edge of the cab. EHHHHHH. Wrong answer! There’s a frame that runs athwartships (look it up, it’s a real word! (I’ve written a novel about the great days of sail…I know my stuff! It’s a word that means from side to side.) of the locomotive, so we shan’t be carving any elegant curves in that. But I had this idear…that’s how my Bostonian mother in law pronounces it…of installing coolly curved fillets instead. NOW you’re talking!

Yes, this is complex. Yes, I’m making it harder than it should be because I’m taking shortcuts that end up being really long cuts. Am I learning anything from this? I should be! Are you?

You know how I’m always raving about my wife. It’s because she’s a wonderful, terrific woman. She’s warm and sensitive and funny, and utterly, blindingly brilliant. Well, today is her birthday. Yes, she’s turned twenty-nine…again.

She grew up on the outskirts of Edward’s Air Force Base, and has some great stories to tell. Lancaster, CA, of the late 60’s was a rough and tumble place. About once a week the police would find a dead body out there in the desert. One afternoon Suzanne and one of her sisters stumbled across one…at least it looked like one. It turned out to be a department store mannequin, a female, stripped naked and tossed between the tumbleweeds.

The girls thought this a great find and dragged it home. Their mother thought it was hilarious. Suzanne’s father had had one or ten too many that night and tumbled his soused self into bed without even a “sleep tight”. Mom and the girls dressed the mannequin in a negligee and put it in bed next to dad.

Next morning mom is making pancakes for the kids when they hear dad’s sarcastic roar from the bedroom: “hah hah hah, very funny.”

So what does this have to do with railroading?

Well, NASA used to do spaceflight testing out at Edwards. I was hiking out there with the Boy Scouts a few years ago, and we came across a pair of tubular rails that stretched for thousands of feet across the desert.

Before NASA could commit humans to spaceflight they wanted to make sure the body could withstand the intense accelleration of a rocket shot. They built a sled and mounted a whup-ass big rocket motor to it and launched it down these rails.

Suzanne’s dad was on hand early in the project, when they were ready to run the sled but not ready to endanger a human. A bunch of these engineers went up into the nearby San Gabriel mountains and shot a brown bear with a tranquilizer dart. They had treed the poor guy, but he feel asleep and out of the tree.

They loaded his slumbering bulk into their pickup truck and went back out to the rocket sled. I can only imagine the scene of these six or seven slide-rule guys in lab coats manhandling that bear into the cockpit of the rocket sled.

They waited for the bear to wake up and the punched the igniter on the rocket sled. The sled shot past whirring cameras, stopping with a thump and without fuel at the railstop a mile away.

The bear was not happy. The engineers anticipated this and approached cautiously, tranquilizer rifles at the ready. What they didn’t anticipate was the even coating of angry bear poo that was smeared across every inch of the canopy, the cockpit, and the bear!

They let the bear have it with another dose of sleepy darts and loaded him back into the pickup. He ended the adventure, poo-smeared and snoring, at the base of the very tree from which they knocked him. What a story that bear had for his kids! “You wouldn’t believe the day I had…”

My point? Well, as you know, Garden Railroading is Real Railroading except when it comes to collosal fecal elements. Perhaps the bear story has…no, there’s no point except that my wife is one terrific lady and I am terribly lucky to be with her, and I wish the very happiest of 29th birthdays!

I have to apologize for that title. I am a man of few jokes, but I make them fairly often. I’m not supposed to be writing on Saturday, as it is the second of my two days off, but when the moment strikes, what the hey?

Let’s see, a little housekeeping are in order: a round of applause, please. My review of Disney’s Ponyo got picked up by Cineroll.com…hooray! My novel has been requested by the Jill Grinberg Agency…they’re looking over the manuscript to see if they want to represent it. Hooray! The framework for my next novel swam into view yesterday. Hooray! There, housekeeping done.

Boarding up the holes in the Bachmann 4-4-0 (nee 4-6-0) was simpler than I thought it would be. Back in one of my previous lives I worked for, and eventually owned, a company that sold mailing machines. One particular postage meter came from the manufacturer with a thick piece of plastic wedged between the mail die and the impression rollers. My company was just tossing them out when I got there. I recognized these as nice pieces of white sheet styrene, 1×3x1/16th. Really nice stuff! So I grabbed a bunch of them out of the dumpster and have slowly been using them over the years. I think I’m down to my last half dozen. They are absolutely ideal for filling in the window frames on this project.

Once I’d closed the square and rectangular windows on the front of the locomotive’s cab, it was time to carve round ones. I cut a strip of paper to the height of the window I wanted. Then I cut the strip to the width, making sure I had a nice rectangle. Then I folded it width-wise, and then height-wise, and cut a nice litte curve from one corner to the other. When I unfolded it; viola, an oval paper window template. A little swipe with a glue stick stuck it to the correct position on the cab. Blasting the front of the cab with Rust-Oleum purple, making sure to block off the half of the cab without the template beforehand, resulted, once the template was removed, in a nice brown circular window. I put the template on the other side, blocked the first side with a piece of paper, and blasted it again with the Rust-Oleum. TA DA – two evenly spaced, identical brown oval window cutting templates!

The very hardest part of this part of the project was cutting through the plastic of the cab. Man, that is some tough stuff! I tried drilling it was a standard bit…what a waste of time! I scribed around the window with an X-acto blade, thinking maybe I could score the plastic and break it out. But that didn’t work, either. I finally resorted to a steel-cutting blade mounted in my simulated Dremel tool. The plastic smelled like BO, but eventually yielded to the mighty blade.
Once through the plastic, the sanding bit in the simulated Dremel rounded the windows out nicely.

I’m very happy with how they turned out. I think I’m going to shoot for a bead around them, perhaps using stretched sprue.

This project, like all the others, takes a lot more focus and thinking than I thought. I looked at the three panes of the side windows, planning to cut and fit a piece of that nice styrene into each one. That would be six custom-fit styrene jobs. I was just goofing around, matching piece to piece, when I noticed that my styrene sheets fit the upper half of the locomotive cab perfectly. I decided to save myself some trouble and hacked out the entire window panel on the cab with the simulated Dremel, so that I could simply fit the entire piece of styrene in the cavity. I worked. It worked. Now the side windows are gone. Tomorrow I’ll be able to hack in the oval windows, using the same template technique I discovered on the smaller front windows.

Meanwhile my graphic artist genius brother has created a new logo for the railway. This one shows the nose of a European style locomotive.

It’s the details, my friend, the details, that make the garden railway real!

Just to be clear, I don’t normally do this. Friday and Saturday nights are my nights off from working on the railroad in order to allow the overtaxed mind to rest.

That and I might just want to go to the movies instead of write an article. I did that last week…took the wife and little girl to see Ponyo, the new Disney/Miyazaki film. You will probably like it for its simplicity and terrific artwork. I liked it because of the acting by Liam Neeson and the score by Joe Hisaishi, although it was reminiscent of Wagner’s Flight of Valkyries. Hisaishi has the unfortunate habit of lifting phrases from popular western pieces so that just when you’re engrossed in the film, watching the gigantic sea waves boil and bubble, you suddenly think, “hey, isn’t that Flight of Valkyries?”, but it’s not, because he changes the ending of the phrases so that they remain his, and then you’re not thinking about the movie anymore. Filmmaking is all about focus. So is theater. So is Garden Railroading. Nice segue, thank you very much!

I was going to take the night off, but my brother the graphic arts genius emailed me the pictures you see above. The brown one is my “artist’s rendition” of the Europeanified Bachmann Not-So-Big-Hauler 4-4-0. I digitally rounded the windows, shortened the stack, replaced the cow catcher with a buffer bar, moved the light to the top of the front buffer, and added saddle tanks. To me it looks more European than the Wild West outline of the original.

My brother took the picture into his PhotoShop Garage and tweaked the details. You can see that now the windows have definition instead of my simple blue ovals. There’s pinstriping along the saddle tank, and now there are logos where before there were only wishes. The addition of “P to P” on the side of the cab is brilliant.

The Board of Directors has been working hard on this Friday night, debating that paint scheme.

“Looks like British Racing Green to me,” mutters the PR guy. “Might sell well to the public to have a British tie-in.”

“What?!?” responds the Chief Engineer, “Have ye gone daft? It’s Paris to Peking, not London to Peking you ruddy ape! Ye canna have British colours on a French locomotive! Have ye slipped a cog?”

“No, no,” agrees the CEO, waving his cigar in the air, “quite right. Won’t do. Won’t do at all.”

“But the LGB is painted green,” wails the PR guy.

“That’s DB green, for the Duetches Bundesbahn,” says the CFO over his brandy. He stares into the amber liquid in his snifter. “It’s not British Racing Green, it’s DB green. The point is moot in either case, and I’ll tell you why. Rust-Oleum is the best sticking paint known to mankind. I am in fact surprised they don’t paint the Space Shuttle with it. It’s not only inexpensive, it’s available at Lowe’s. We’ll have a credit from that plumbing device that didn’t work on Monday. We can use that to acquire a couple of cans of gloss black Rust-Oleum along with the correct plumbing device.”

The room is silent for a moment.

“DONE!” roars the CEO, and everyone but the PR guy looks thrilled.

“I really liked the green,” he mutters.

So, now you know how things are done on the Paris to Peking Garden Railway. It’s all driven by cost…wait, isn’t that how real railroads do it? Oh yeah, that’s right, Garden Railroading is Real railroading!

Now, my wife is a wonderful, beautiful, and brilliant woman. She really is brilliant, with a Master’s Degree in Russian literature. And my kids are very smart and kind of look like me, which I take as a sign that they really are mine. I point all this out as evidence of the fact that I aint no dummy. But I’m not smarter than my plumbing.

I must apologize for not writing yesterday. My writing hours were absorbed by the drains in my house. The kitchen sink gurgled and bubbled and refused to drain for a while, and then suddenly ran empty.

“Daddy! There’s water all over the garage floor!”

Oh joy.

A quick trip and $35 to Lowe’s and now at least the water drains outside, not in the garage! I spent $22 on a 50ft snake that just doesn’t fit down my drain hole (don’t tell that one to your kids). My 25ft rotary snake fits but can’t reach the blockage, and I am both confused and furious! Stupid pipes. Saturday, oh ho ho ho, wait for Saturday, Mr. Blockage! Aaaargh!

There. Sorry.

One of the great things about our hobby of garden railway building is that it demands so many more skills than our indoor railroading brethren must use. This is not to take anything away from their work…I have seen some true works of genius laid out on benchwork. Google “Bill Aldrich New Haven” and you will find an amazing, exquisite work of art.

But their work is still just scale modeling. Even though modern model railroading involves some rather sophisticated technologies, indoor modeling still involves building scale landscapes and filling them with scale models.

On the wild and woolly garden railway things are not quite so cut and dried. Take, for example, the landscaping battle I must continually fight with Zorro the Wonder Idiot. Unless you have a particularly cranky cat that gets locked in your layout room you don’t really have to contend with the droppings of such wild animals. And I read about a garden railroader who lost his entire pike in a typhoon. If that happened to your basement railroad, you’d be gone with it!

It can truly be said that Garden Railroading is Real Railroading.

It was about this that I was thinking while I considered the best angle of attack on the Europeanification of the Bachmann locomotive. The artist in me really wants to tackle those round cab windows, drilling oblong holes in the cab’s front wall.

“Just do it”, the artist voice says.

“Ye canna do that, ye moron!” wails the Chief Engineer. “Ye must draw yerself a plan!”

“At the very least,” continues the CEO in a surprising show of engineering acumen, “close up the windows with sheet styrene!”

“And sand down the framing,” chimes in the PR guy, “so that it looks nice and purty!”

Well, these guys are probably right. I’ll have pictures of that part of the project tomorrow night, when I get home from the 43 mile commute…let’s see, the Isuzu gets 20 mpg, so each day I use up a little over 4 gallons of gas at $3.00 a gallon, that’s $12 a day times twenty days a month, hmmm, this could get tricky…show of hands? Anyone? Anyone at all? I came up with $37.15…anyone else get that? No? Hmmm. Maybe I’m not so bright after all…

Europeanification. It’s a word. Go ahead, look it up. I’ll wait. It’s not? You, my friend, must have a cheap dictionary!

As you know, the Bachmann Big Hauler 4-6-0 is now a Bachmann Not-So-Big Hauler 4-4-0. It’s lost its glitzy green hue, instead wearing a coat of dowdy brown Rust-Oleum. I think it’s pretty cool looking, myself. Kind of tough and industrial but charming at the same time. My plan had been to paint it black, but the brown Rust-Oleum was all I had in the garage.

My brother is a graphic artist, and a wizard at Photoshop. He emailed me a picture of my own locomotive in black paint! And it looks pretty cool – much more macho!

But the Paris to Peking Railway travels from, get this, Paris to Peking. I just can’t see some Parisian firm buying an American locomotive when their own are so abundant. No matter how I paint the Bachmann Not-So-Big Hauler it’s still going to have an American outline. Unless, of course, I follow the clues given by my brother, and paint the thing in MS Paint!

I leafed through a bunch of Model Railroader magazines and a book on my shelf called Encyclopedia of Trains. It’s a book filled with all kinds of drawings and photographs of locomotives. Like you, I picture long strings of box cars or passenger coaches when I think of trains, not just a locomotive. The book is clearly titled to sell to people who plan to give it as a gift and don’t know a fiddler’s fart about trains!

Anyway, I tried to find common European attributes to locomotives built prior to 1910 that I could model with my limited brain power and modeling skills. Round windows on the cab seemed to be pretty popular, as did saddle tanks. The Europeans tended to put the headlight down low, just in front of the boiler. And they used that interesting buffer system.

I opened my picture of the 4-4-0 in a program by Serif called Photo Plus. It’s available as a free trial download from Serif.com, and is a really powerful picture editor. I take my pictures most often with my Blackberry Curve, although the detail shots come from my old Sony Handycam that I dropped in my swimming pool. Yes, yes I did. I caught if before it hit the bottom, but I don’t think it was designed as an underwater camera. It took two weeks to dry out, and doesn’t like to shoot video anymore, and the auto exposure board took a hit, but the lenses are fine, and if you’re careful with it, it still shoots great pictures! I use it to make videos, only shooting them in studio, and the Handycam is Firewired to my computer. As the computer does all the recording, the camera just acts as a lensing unit. Am I off topic?

Between Serif and MS Paint I conjured up the picture you see above. I figure I can close up the cab’s existing windows with sheet plastic and then carve new, round ones. The cowcatcher is held on by two screws. That bar in the front that holds the buffers – I can make that out of laminated craft sticks, or, gasp, a single piece of wood.

Those tanks, however, are causing a bit of consternation. I could make them out of sheet styrene, but they will take a lot of handling, as that’s the primary pick-up-the-locomotive spot. Wood? Polished and lacquered wood might hold that shape. It would be heavier than empty plastic, too.

Why go through this Europeanification process? Why not stick with the LGB 0-4-0. Well, the LGB will remain on the roster, for sure, as will the New Bright 2-6-0, if only for comic relief. But I’m just dying to see if an ultra-heavy locomotive (six, count ‘em SIX D-cell batteries in the boiler) can tame the wild rails of the China Section. If it can, and I’m thinking it will, it will open the ENTIRE China Section to rail travel once more. If that happens, this is the first of a long line of battery-powered pieces that look European, effectively eliminating the tyranny of AC power.

My little black canine idiot has, of course, completely buried the China Loop again, so I’ll have to dig THAT out before I can test this guy out. Still, I believe this is progress…

Now that we’ve settled this scale issue, I reckon I can finish up the conversion of the Bachmann 4-6-0 locomotive. As you’ll recall, may plan was to upscale it from 1/20.3 to 1/18. The upscaling included shortening the wheelbase to handle my ultra-tight railway curves and widening the cab to match a 1/18th scale combine with which I’ve been dawdling.

If you’ve been following along, you’ll know that I rather completed the Ukraine Station platform and placed “in situ” before checking clearances. My 1/18th modified cab very definitely conflicts with the station platform, extending a good inch over it. I had to abandon the widening portion of the project. I decided I could use the Bachmann-supplied 1/20.3 cab instead. Oh well.

I reduced the locomotive from a 4-6-0 to a 4-4-0 by removing the forward driving wheels. But then the locomotive looked really stupid, so I hacked out a piece of the boiler on the locomotive, removing the section that held the forward dome. The locomotive tapered from back to front…not anymore. The four-wheel pilot truck looked really stupid, too, as it is very long. I hacked a section out of the center of that, using epoxy and a piece of wood to reconnect the ends.

I noticed the other day that, even after having removed the forward drive wheels, the middle set of drive wheels still tend to pop out of the curves. SO, Captain Whizbang here decided to remove the SECOND set of wheels and replace them with non-flanged wheels. I now have this interesting locomotive with four flanged pilot wheels and two flanged drivers. I haven’t tested it yet, but I’m not expecting fireworks.

One of the more interested problems lies in the angle of the driving rods. I’m not sure how I compressed the dimension, but now the driving rods extend back from the valves at a weird angle to the rearmost drive wheels. They run okay, but look decidedly odd. Because I moved the wheels around, the molded driving rod pegs on the wheels no longer apply. The main driving rods crashed in the pegs on the forward wheels. I used my simulated Dremel tool to grind off the ends of those pegs.

When I tried to get the thing to run down the track the connecting rods crashed against the wheel hubs of the middle drivers! The simulated Dremel tool came back out so that I could grind down the wheel hubs to the ends of the axles. Then the driving rods conflicted with the hubs on the rear drivers…my goodness, so many conflicts in such a small space!

I spray painted the whole shootin’ match with Rust-Oleum brown….the darkest color on hand. Eventually the thing will be gloss black, but I wanted to get an idea of what it looked like. You remember building your Star Wars-style spacecraft out of bits and pieces of other kits, don’t you? It looked really crummy until you painted it all the same color…then it looked pretty cool! Same thing applies to kitbashed rolling stock.

With much wailing and gnashing of teeth, much grinding of plastic and swearing, the first custom-built locomotive for the Paris to Peking Railway is finally…well, almost…complete…sort of.

As far as I can remember, Paris is in Europe, probably France. And Peking, now Beijing, is in China. Neither one of these places would run western prototype locomotives…another design change!

Speaking of China, here’s a little tidbit that will help you out next time you go out for Chinese food:

When the waiter asks you how you liked it, say “HUN hao.” You pronounce hun the same as you would when referring to Attila The. Hao is pronounced like How, but with an “ah” after the “H”. Got it? In Chinese, “Hao” is good. “BU hao” (pronounced BOO how) is bad, “HUN hao” is very good. Don’t tell the waiter the food was “BU hao” – you’ll insult him.

And don’t tell him the food was “ma ma HU hu” (mah mah HOO hoo). It’s the Chinese way of saying “eh.” If he asks you “how are you this evening?” you can say “ma ma HU hu”, and he will laugh. Most westerners don’t use “ma ma HU hu”, but we should. It’s slang, but it’s very common in China. Shouldn’t we show a little interest in other people’s culture? If you were working in China, wouldn’t you get a kick out of your Chinese customers trying to use your language? I know I would.

There you go. There’s you tip for the day! I’m afraid it was better than the tip I gave to the waiter. He looked at it and said “ma ma HU hu.”