When I had my HO roundy round in the basement, I was the master of the universe. I had control over lights, over sound…even electricity flowed only at my command. Want to take a picture? Turn on the lights over here, over there, light up the structures…2 in the afternoon or 2 in the morning, it didn’t matter.
As you may have heard, Garden Railroading is Real Railroading. The sun is pretty hard to simulate without a bunch of expensive equipment. And, as you may also have heard, I’m cheap.
My backyard has a nice patio on the northwest corner of the house, a nice little side yard that runs on the southwest side, and a swimming pool in between. The Paris to Peking Railway runs on the west side of the pool.
There’s a gate that separates the pool from the patio on the north and another that separates the side yard on the south. My wife has been testing the theory that the dogs will be willing to stay on the patio if we close the patio gate. But the dogs can go through the gate, so she’s been sliding heavy potted plants across the gate. I’ve been working on the railroad today, and ran rather late, and so had the gate open.
What I had in mind was a really nice evening shot of the railway, with the little lights on and the Bachmann Not-So-Big Hauler locomotive in front of the station, all lit up with the nice blue of the falling evening. With my hands full of locomotive and power pack I leave the house, cross the patio, and find it’s blocked because in the time it took me to go get the camera and put it in my pocket and pick up the locomotive my wife had closed the gate and slid the plants across it. And she’d turned on the garden hose to water the plants.
So I went through the house…each of my daughters has a door that opens into the backyard. My older daughter’s opens right onto the pool, but she’s “in a mood”, so that door was off limits. Instead I had to go all the way through the house, out my younger daughter’s door, through the side yard, and around the pool to get the locomotive on the rails and the power supply plugged in.
But there’s a GFI hooked up somewhere on the power line that supplies the outlet for the garden railway, and it was popped. So I had to go and find the outlet that had the tripped GFI. I remembered that I built a nifty little shed at one corner of the house in which I place my railway hardware…Mr. Wizard seemed to have built the shed directly over the outlet with the GFI. I had to go around the pool, down the side yard, through my little girl’s room, through the house, across the patio, and, black widows and brown recluses be damned, reach up into the dark corner of that shed and fumble around in the dark until I could push the little red button in the middle of the outlet.
I traveled the three hundred mile route back out to the pool and plugged in the power pack. I hooked the quasi-mangled overhead wires to the power pack…nothing happened. Is it the GFI? Is it the Power Pack? Is it the overhead wiring? It took a moment, but I found that the overhead wiring wasn’t connected at the station platform. Blink, on came the lights!
I pointed my Blackberry at the scene…little green flashing light on the Blackberry? What? Low battery?
Another three hundred miles into the garage to find the charger for the Blackberry, trekked that thing all the way through the house, now losing enthusiasm for what is fast becoming a night shot, when, in the hallway, I see my older daughter’s door open…Ah Hah! I cut through her room, eliminating what seems like a half an hour from the walk through my little girl’s room and down the now dark side yard.
Plugged everything in, got my shots, relaxed for a moment and enjoyed the little lights twinkling on the pool. This is, after all, what model railroading is about. Wait a minute…that’s the wrong pool!
While I’m taking pictures my wife’s watering of the potted plants has run over the pots and is flooding the pool deck because the drain must be plugged! I can’t reach the plugs for the power pack and the cell phone charger without standing in a two inch deep puddle!
So, instead of enjoying the sparkly lights on the pool, I’m getting the garden hose and fishing it through the deepening water before it dumps itself into the pool to find the drain. I find it, shove the garden hose down it to get it clear, and am ultimately successful…the water gurgles down to a little whirlpool. Phew.
Now, I’m not complaining. There are plenty, plenty of people who don’t have it as good as I do, and I am thankful for every blessing I’ve been given.
But there are times when circumstances rather stack up to take the magic out of the moment. When you look at these pictures, therefore, imagine them lighter, and you’ll see what I hand in mind!
