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…

I had something of a revelation yesterday. I was sitting on the…well, I was reading the August issue of Garden Railways Magazine. There’s a great article in there by Kevin Strong detailing the vagaries of scale in Garden Railroading.

If you’re a garden railroader you already know that Gauge 1, our most standard gauge for outdoor use, only refers to the distance between the rails, not to the scale of trains running on them. For honest-to-Pete standard prototype trains, the accurate scale can be between 1/32 and 1/29. Narrow gauge trains range from 1/24 through 1/20.3.

That is, of course, unless you’re Dr. Rocket Scientist, here, who blithely decides to convert HIS railway to 1/18th scale. Why 1/18th? Well, because my little girl likes Polly Pockets, and she’s roughly 1/18th (Polly Pockets, not my little girl). And there are those older GI Joe guys that scale out to that size…I’ve got a bunch of them. And there are Burago and Maisto die cast cars that are both affordable and 1/18th in scale. Shall we make a list of model railroad structures and/or rolling stock manufactured in 1/18th? Go ahead, I’ll wait. You may as well make a list of Latvian astronauts, or species of coconut trees endemic to Norway. The answer is the same.

I decided I would start with the Bachmann Big Hauler 1/22.5 scale 4-6-0 locomotive. I planned to just bump that fellow up to a nifty 1/18 scale 4-4-0. While I was at it, I figured I would make a nice spacious cab for the GI Joe guys. Actually, my little guys are CORPS! Fellows – they are civilian guys that are fully posable, although I ‘m not certain they’re still in production. If you saw Thursday’s post, you’ll know that I wisely failed to consider clearance when I built my station platform. My 1/18th conversion project is in severe jeopardy.

The Paris to Peking Railway Company holds a meeting of the board Saturday afternoon.

“What is all this balderdash about?” asks the CEO.

“I canna build ye yer rolling stock and meet either your timetable or yer budget,” the Chief Engineer whines.

“What???” The CFO chokes on his cigar.

“’tis true! Wee bonnie lass will be graduatin’ from college ere I can get just that locomotive done!”

“It’s a disaster,” sobs the PR guy.

“Well,” blusters the CEO, “what scale CAN you do?”

“There’s plenty of struc-yures in 1/20.3,” the Chief Engineer pulls at his red beard pensively.

“Oh, dash it all,” the CEO thunders, “go ahead with 1/20.3. Where’s my brandy?”

So, there it is. It turns out 1/20.3 is about 90% of 1/18, which means a six foot man in 1/18 stands around 5’4” in 1/20.3. A seven foot doorway scales down to 6’3” or so. That’s acceptable, isn’t it?

What it means for the Details Department is no placing figures right next to doorways. It means lopping off the legs of locomotive engineers …

“What???” gargles the Chief Engineer. “Ye’re doin’ what to mah men?”

But it also means that rolling stock, particularly the Bachmann Spectrum series, is now available.

The only problem I’m seeing is that the Paris to Peking Railway is European, while most of the 1/20.3 stock I’ve seen is American prototype. That’s going to be an issue.

The board meeting is adjourned, and the air, now quiet, still smells of cigars and spilt brandy. It’s been a big day on the P-to-P Ry. Oddly enough, the decision to go to 1/20.3 makes the garden railway about 10% smaller…go figure!

Part of the adventure in working on a garden railway is, well, the adventure of it all! You’re free to create, to build, to mastermind an empire! And, since we know Garden Railroading is Real Railroading, your empire exists in the real world. You are doing the real deal!

In our zeal to create cool stuff in the right scale, with the right look, and with that cool “oh wow” thing that makes garden railroading so amazing, we sometimes get just a wee bit ahead of ourselves.

Case in point: my conversion of the 1/28th scale Bachmann 4-6-0 locomotive into a 1/18th scale 4-4-0. I took the width from a set of drawings for a 1/24th scale baggage combine I got from Garden Railways Magazine and expanded up to 1/18th scale. I built the frame for the combine out of basswood, and, believe it or not, popsicle sticks. Using the width of the combine as a gauge, I widened the cab of the locomotive to match. Sure it looks a little funky, but, hey, it’s narrow gauge, it’s supposed to look funky!

Now, as you know, we’ve recently been rather busy building the platforms for those buildings in the Ukrainian Section. It was a great rush to grab a piece of plywood and whup it into a nifty looking railway platform. And, if I do say so myself, the new platform looks simply smashing.

Ah, but there’s the rub…literally. It seems when Captain Whizbang grabbed a piece of plywood, he didn’t think about clearance…

“Aye, clearance laddie,” croaks the Chief Engineer over his cigar,” ye didna’ think o’ the clearance, did ye?” He cackles softly. “Ye’ll not get far without ye dunna plan yer clearance!”

Well, whatever.

Interestingly enough, the story is true. The plywood foundation for the station in the Ukraine lies too close to the rails to allow my modified 1/18th locomotive, and therefore any cars of that same width, to pass without, how do you say it, frictive issues?

The real surprise came when I attempted to pass the cypress tree with my modified locomotive…towed by the New Bright 2-6-0 because the 4-4-0 doesn’t run yet. KEEEEERASH! Over she went. Stupid tree.

The real, real surprise came when we squeaked past the farmhouse and its even more ramshackle platform. Surprise! The locomotive cleared it with fractions of an inch to spare! I claim no genius, mind you, but I do blame simple dumb luck!

So, yes, the station platform looks great. I have about eight hours of labor into it. I can’t trim the front of the platform because I’ve already planked it. I can’t trim the back of the platform because I’ve already custom-fit it to the station buildings, and I would have to tear up planking to accommodate their new location. Plus, have you ever tried to “shave” ½ inch plywood? I’d sooner shave a porcupine!

“Ye’r an idiot,” mutters the Chief Engineer.

I checked the clearance of the wide locomotive through the temporary retaining walls, but not through the semi-permanent log walls in place now. Now I am concerned about that, too.

Perhaps this conversion to 1/18th thing needs a little more thought. Perhaps wider isn’t better on the garden railway. Perhaps one should plan a little bit before one invests eight hours of labor in a project. Perhaps.

“Perhaps ye’r an idiot,” says the Chief Engineer as he claps on his cap and leaves.

Perhaps.

Although it’s fading into pastiche of other memories, the thrilling Wyatt Exposition Day did have one dark moment. Young Wyatt shoved the LGB 0-4-0 up and down the track, eventually stopping it in front of the 1/18th scale farmhouse forlornly propped in a corner in the Ukraine Section. He stopped running the train and stared at it.

“What happened to this one?” he asked.

I searched for the terms that would explain to this four-year-old enthusiast that it’s a kitbashed farmhouse from a superbly detailed WWII playset that was given to me by my stepson about a decade ago that I threw together to impress him into thinking the railway was cooler than it is because it doesn’t go nearly as far as he had anticipated. But that seemed so long…

“Is it a haunted house?”

“Yes, it’s a haunted house. That’s why it looks all run down like that. It’s haunted!” I chortled, saved for the day.

And that is why Wyatt is welcome to come back to the railway any old time. Give him an explanation he can accept and it’s done!

Well, of course I can’t leave the house looking like that! It’s in the Ukraine of 1910, before the depression and the world wars. This is supposed to be a happy Ukraine, and a blown up farmhouse just doesn’t fit.

Having successfully hacked up the LGB Pola station, I tried the same technique on this very nice, albeit battle-damaged, structure. It’s made by a company called Panache Place, the American division of a Hong Kong company called Unimax, and marketed under the brand name Forces of Valor, and really is very nicely detailed. Unlike the LGB’s solid walls, these guys are hollow styrene. Where the saw left a nice, finished wall on the LGB it left an ugly gaping hole on the Forces of Valor. That’s okay – they can face the corners!

Assembling the corner, which is all of the house I had available after hacking away the battle-damaged pieces, was rather like building a jigsaw puzzle. Still, a little judicious application of glue here, a little filing there, and voila, a quarter of a house!

I used the same technique for building the platform upon which it sits as I did for the station: cut a piece of plywood and screw a board to it. Now you know my secret technique! I’ll probably plank this platform with popsicle sticks rather than coffee stir-sticks just to make it look different.

There are some modifications that need to be done. Floors and a roof might be nice, and windows could use some glass. And a coat of paint wouldn’t come amiss, either!

There’s a bit of dilemma brewing around all three of my partial structures, and it involves my seven year old daughter and her friends, and young Mr. Wyatt as well. I’m of the mind that the insides of these structures should be furnished to the hilt so that you can see something when you look into the windows. My daughter wants to furnish them herself. But, and this may come as a shock to you, a seven year old doesn’t have quite the same sense of scale and appropriateness as I do. I’ve hit the wall that delineates the difference between scale models and play value. Drat!

My compromise for the moment is to complete the outsides, making them both attractive and robust, but leaving the insides to her. I’ll just turn the internal lights off when I have guests!

Unless the guests are in the seven year old bracket, in which case we won’t be running the trains at all but using the buildings to play host to Polly Pockets and Littlest Pet Shop!

In the excitement and enthusiasm of yesterday’s Exposition, my wife got wild with the clippers and brush clearing tools. Boom! Down came the overgrown tree limbs, rrrrip, up came the tender tendrils of crab grass. The garden railway gained real estate!

What got exposed was Paris…well, perhaps not Paris itself, but certainly the roadbed for the Parisian Loop. And, uh, some other stuff.

Discovered under the plant detritus was an interesting 1/18th scale excursion car I’d built some time ago…

This sounds like a long stretch for an excuse, and it probably is, but I had a stroke about six years ago. Since that event, my memory is shot to crackers. I can learn new things, etc., but there are certain events that completely, completely escape my memory. I can’t, for example, remember the details of my daughter’s birth. I mean, I’m reasonably certain I had something to do with it, but my wife tells me details about being in the delivery room that may as well have happened to some fella in France, because I don’t remember any part of them. Weird, huh?

So, here we are at the Wyatt Exposition Day, and I’m chatting away with Wyatt’s dad about how the railroad has been abused and forgotten for ten years, how it’s a shame the guy before me let it go to ruin, and my wife fishes out this excursion car that I obviously built.

“Honey, do you want to keep this?”

I suddenly remembered that I had a hand in the abandonment of the railway…I sheepishly said “uh, sure” in as small a voice as I could find!

Anyway, the chassis was stolen from a New Bright bobber caboose (I found the body shell in my train cabinet, but could not for the life of me remember what I’d done with the chassis!) and featured an interesting body. Custom built from popsicle sticks and epoxy, the body has been literally buried under thick, moist brush for a good two years. Although suffering from some warpage in the side rails and a little discoloration of the wood (can you spell “black”?), the thing looks pretty good. The first thing I noticed was the crude workmanship, obviously mine, but the first thought I had was “Cool! Working couplers and wheels!”

Another thing discovered, or, in this case, not discovered, was the track for Parisian Loop. As feared, it’s gone. I could blame the dogs, but I do have a vague memory of removing the rails because they had lost their gauge in the middle of the curve. I was young and dumb…you know, it was a couple of years ago…and I tore it all up. At the time I believe I had money. In either case, the cause of the New Bright 2-6-0’s popping off the track was partly gauge issue, but mostly due to the locomotive’s extremely light weight. I know that. Now.

The other big discovery was the wiring ganglia. This, my friend, will take some research, but promises to be a treasure trove of information about how the Parisian Loop is wired!

So, now it’s on to Paris! I’m certain that resolving the wiring of the Parisian Turnout will help me determine the issues surrounding the China Turnout. With those two turnouts working, and with the replacement track I found (a substantial number of LGB brass curved sections), I believe we’ll be 100% within the next two weeks!

As you’ll recall, I cut my LGB/Pola in half along the roof’s ridgeline in order to make two half buildings out of it.

My plan is both devious and simple at the same time. As we’ve opted for the track-powered LGB locomotive (see Electrification Consideration for the juicy details), my presentation on the Wyatt Day Exhibition will be rather short. To fill the potential interest gap in the four-year-old Wyatt’s itenerary, I’ve opted to include some “play value” scenery. If you can’t blind ‘em with your brilliance, dazzle ‘em with your BS!

Now, my seven-year-old daughter has been a silent witness to this subtle subterfuge, not knowing that I am pulling the old switcheroo on the little brother of one of her best friends. She has, in fact, watched the architectural surgery with both interest and enthusiasm.

That was all yesterday. Today I knew I had to clean up the piece of plywood I threw under the two halfway houses to keep them stable. Indeed. This morning I found my two story structure destroyed, having been dashed to the ground by what must have been a strong gust of wind (perhaps of the canine variety).

My littlest girl watched in anticipation as I reassembled my shattered domiciles. By the way, I tried out the look of a three story station: it’s too much, looking overwhelmingly big-bad idea. She kept asking me when she could decorate. By decorate, I thought she meant painting the buildings. I have to tell you, never hire a seven-year-old to paint your house, even in 1/18th scale.

“When I’ve got the second floor done,” I kept telling her.

Cutting a piece of plywood to serve as the second floor was surprisingly difficult. Perhaps my motto Measure Once, Cut Twice doesn’t serve me well. I eventually cut three second floors, although I only needed one. But I was able to use the other two second floors as first floors, and my little cutting adventure shall remain our little secret. I meant to do that!

I drilled a hole in the plywood base through which I stuck a two-inch long brass screw. I fixed the screw to the plywood by using a nut, countersunk into the wood so as not to rise above it. Then I drilled a hole in the bottom of the corresponding wall on the structure. The building slips down over the screw, making it virtually windproof. I installed another such assembly on other end wall…the building is removable but very stable. I did the same thing for the smaller structure.

Finally, my very patient little girl was able to decorate. Out came the Disney Princesses and the Polly Pockets figures, along with all their various pieces of electric pink plastic furniture. To my deep and immediately relief, she had in mind “interior decorating”…”you know,” she said, “with furniture and stuff!” Not a paint brush in sight.

It turns out I was correct about that play value thing. I chopped up another house…a 1/18th scale shattered farm house from a line of military figures that my stepson gave it to me some years ago, and I haven’t found a use for it until today. Cutting off the “shattered” pieces and rearranging them makes for a complete, albeit somewhat small, non-shattered structure. In this case, I only had enough material to make two complete walls, so I placed the building in a corner.

So, you see, it’s important to have little eyes look upon your empire. They give you insight, help refresh your vision, and remind you of what is important. Most of all, though, they can help you decorate!

All right, back to work. I thought my friend Wyatt might be coming by to take a peek at the railway progress this afternoon, so I set about straightening things up. I swept the tracks along the temporary retaining wall, I cleared the rails at that place where I’ll be soon building the road bridge. I cleared the jacaranda blossoms and leaves and stick and twigs from the rails.

To make sure things were working okay, I set my trusty New Bright 2-6-0 up the hill, over the new section of sand, and around the China Loop. That little battery powered fellow made a complete trip the very first time out!

For the second loop I attached two LGB passenger cars to it and let her rip. Even though I have greatly reduced the incline over the former root area, the 2-6-0 is so low in adhesive weight that it couldn’t pull those two heavy cars over the hill. I used my 0-5-0 pusher (the one God gave me) and gently pushed the cars up the slight slope. Slowly the drivers churned and churned and caught and churned and caught and caught and over the little hill she went. I thought she could. But all great things must come to a halt. A screaming halt.

Unseen by the train’s conductor, my daughter had placed a 1/18th fellow on the platform of the lead passenger car. The fellow didn’t seem to like the application of pressure from my hand and fell halfway off the train car. His head violated clearance rules and got stuck on one of the uprights of my temporary retaining fence. His head provided enough pressure to uncouple the hoop-style couplers on the LGB car from the locomotive, which sped crazily around the turn and derailed itself.

Much swearing and carrying on by daddy. Now, honey, don’t repeat that to your friends…

I watched the 2-6-0 bouncing down my rough little track and spotted a design flaw that will forever make that little fellow run badly. Then I spotted another. I double checked my discovery against my Bachmann 4-6-0 and found that I was correct.

As I’ve mentioned, the 2-6-0 carries its batteries in the tender. The locomotive therefore has very low tractive weight, especially as it has to lug around that tender full of batteries. ON TOP OF THAT (those are my big discovery announcers) I noticed today that the pilot truck is not sprung, but merely screwed to the frame. I imagine the truck works just fine on the plastic track that comes with your Christmas train set. But the Paris-Peking Railway is rough, my friend, and I watched that pilot truck bounce around like a toy kite in a typhoon. The slightest imperfection in the track…out of gauge rails, a leaf, a twig, a small rock, and that pilot truck popped right off the track. Worse, it tends to flog around and bounce off the ties, causing the drivers to derail.

To prove my point, I took out my soon to be completed modification of a Bachmann 4-6-0 to a 4-4-0. That locomotive has a spring pressing the pilot truck to the rails…much better.

But, in shortening the wheelbase of the locomotive, I believe I created another problem. My forward set of drivers pop clear of the rails on the turns, causing a derailment. The 2-6-0 wheelbase is longer, but perhaps is enough under gauge to allow all three to fit into the turns. Hmmph. I also spotted the need for a trailing truck under the new cab of my 4-4-0.

NOT ONLY THAT, but the plug that connects the tender to the locomotive on the 2-6-0 extends so far back from the locomotive as to interfere with the blade on the tender’s coupler.

Nothing but problems! What to do? I found the old power pack that came with the house, but it is so corroded I’m not certain I want to plug it in.

Did you ever read Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand? Motive power, my friend. A railroad is nothing without motive power. I realized today that my motive power STINKS!

What if you had a massive, 108 foot wide canyon to cross with your railway and timber was in short supply, but bamboo was plentiful? Well, you know that bamboo can be remarkably strong, with a tensile strength greater than steel, and, as you are the chief construction engineer with the French railway company building the trestle, you know that in China, bamboo is the traditional building material of choice. So, you decide to build your bridge out of bamboo.

You are in China, so you consult with the local Chinese authorities on building the bridge. After all, they are, in this year of 1901, the absolute authorities on building with bamboo. They help you sketch out a plan that takes advantage of bamboo’s awesome strength and natural beauty.

Well, I didn’t have any Chinese authorities with which to consult, but I came up with this plan nonetheless. And I’m not French, either. But the bridge design is graceful, to scale, and can be built from bamboo. It will be a stunner when finished.

Although in the 1/1 scale world, bamboo is one of the fastest growing plants on the planet, with some varieties growing as fast as a meter a day, and is incredibly plentiful, I don’t have ready access to a good supply. What I do have is a good supply of soda straws. Yes, soda straws. You can’t beat them for price, or for versatility. And darn if they don’t look like 1/18th scale bamboo!

So, here we are in the China section, tasked with building our chasm-spanner out of soda-straw bamboo. I tried out a small section, just to see what would happen. It looks pretty good!

Here’s how we’ll build the bridge: Two sheets of plywood, cut to the shape required in the plan, separated by a 2×4 which serves as the roadbed. We’ll plate the roadbed with craft sticks, cut to shape of course. They’ll represent bamboo boards. And we’ll use popsicle sticks to line the inside of those arches.

To make the bridge look as if it’s made of bamboo, we’ll coat the plywood sheet with epoxy and embed the soda straws, plastic, not paper, and straight, none of that bendy stuff. The straws will stay stuck in the epoxy, and the epoxy will waterproof the outside of the bridge. We’ll shellac the crackers out of the entire assembly, of course, as a measure of weatherproofing.

In the sample I built, I painted the front of the assembly with Rust-Oleum flat white. My goal was to provide a uniform base color and give my cheapo acrylic paints a tooth-some surface on which to cling. You know, of course, that acrylic won’t stick to hydrophilic surfaces like smooth plastic, so you have to add a base coat of some etching paint. Rust-Oleum works great.

Using what I had on hand, I flowed watered-down flat Espresso colored acrylic paint between the straws, then washed the whole thing in watered-down flat Ivory acrylic. The two colors blended nicely, and the Ivory adds enough of a yellow tinge to look fairly realistic. To really push the detail, we’ll paint little bands of brown to simulate the joints in the bamboo. In the real deal, of course, we’ll need to use an oil based paint for the colors, as the acrylic won’t hold up under the weather.

I haven’t priced out scale bamboo yet, but it can hardly be as cheap as a box of a 1000 soda straws from Smart & Final and a tube of epoxy. Plywood is cheap, and I have a gazillion popsicle sticks on hand from a dozen other projects. All I need is a fresh 2×4 and I’m on my way…in fact, the piece cut off from an eight foot length can serve as internal blocks to support the bottoms of the arches…better yet!

So, there it is: an inexpensive bridge that should look like a million bucks when it’s done. Now, it’s finding the cheap labor to actually build it…

I’ve been thinking a lot about bridges lately. The China Station end of my garden railway requires three of them, and they are puzzling in the extreme.

The first bridge is already in place, and is rather more like a tunnel. As you’ll recall, the railway is set on a concrete roadbed that is a good six inches thick. I knocked out a section near the apex of the southern turn to provide for drainage from the mountain I had created. The drainage hole was big enough to qualify as a tunnel, and actually now fits thematically with the railroad. It looks rough and simple, much as you’d expect a simple Chinese tunnel to appear at the turn of the twentieth century. That part’s okay, and looks pretty good. But what kind of support would you see on the rail bed itself? Do you suppose there would be handrails along the side?

The second bridge is a road bridge. As motorcars have not yet appeared in China’s countryside, this bridge can be rather simple. Still, it requires a degree of architectural styling to fit the theme. The middle picture is what I have in mind. There’s a great series of articles in Garden Railways Magazine by Ray R. Dunakin III about building real rock retaining walls (look for it at www.trains.com). He built a stunning arch out of natural stones that would look great down there as the road bridge.

The problem is that third bridge. It’s a trestle, six feet in length. As you can see from the bottom picture, it’s quite a piece of crummy work. Don’t get me wrong, it looks good from three feet away. My brother’s a fan of “three foot modeling”…if it looks good from three feet away, that’s all that matters. But the guy who put it together didn’t model a bridge, he just built one. The difference is that it lacks detail, and therefore erodes any sense of accuracy or realism in that part of the railway. It stretches for six feet, which is 108 feet in 1/18th scale, but has no supports underneath. It’s a major bridge, but the modeler before me simply tossed in a cool looking toy bridge.

So, here’s the challenge: Imagine a 108’ long trestle over a rocky gorge. Now picture that it’s for a narrow gauge railway. NOW picture that it is built in China in the late 1800’s. The railway, we assume, is a European, probably French concern, as one end of the line terminates in Paris. If I were the French builders, I would probably use steel arches over the rocks.

But this is another place where garden railroading and reality part ways. The bridge is a major scenic element in the China section of the railway. That bridge has to “look” Chinese. Perhaps I’ll build it out of bamboo rather than steel.

I shouldn’t admit this, but I’m using the Dreamworks movie “Kung Fu Panda” for my research into Chinese architecture. If you haven’t seen the movie you are truly missing something great. The artwork alone is stunning, and perfectly depicts not just a small Chinese village but a huge palace. But I didn’t spot any massive railroad trestles in it…darn!

Well, the best laid plans are those of mice and men, or something like that. The one thing I wanted to do today was pour that concrete…but the day got in the way. The true story? I’m afraid to pour the concrete…all right, there, I said it. It’s true.

I was an actor in a television commercial once. We started at nine in the morning and worked straight through until two o’clock the next morning. The last shot of the day had the lead actress get up from her chair, sighing as she went. The director wasn’t happy with it. He kept shooting it again and again…I swear we went through 37 takes of that shot. And the director kept reading the actress the riot act, telling her she was doing it wrong; “breathe IN when you sigh, not OUT,” and then “Why are you breathing IN when you sigh? Nobody does that!”. When we were done I asked the actress why she put up with all that harassment. She said she knew the director was simply scared…he didn’t want to close down the set for fear he’d missed something during the day’s shooting, but couldn’t identify the missing item, and therefore kept running the same shot over and over out of fear. That’s not why I’m afraid of pouring the concrete, but it’s a cool story.

Pouring concrete is a permanent step, and I’m not quite ready at the job site. Just a couple of more things have to be cleared up before I’m ready, but I will most likely be able to hit it tomorrow.

Instead, how about the wooden cab on that locomotive? I’m sorry about the photographs…I had no idea they were so out of focus until I posted them. I’ll do better ones as the project moves forward.

The chassis is the previously mentioned Bachmann 4-6-0 that I’ve converted into a 4-4-0. I did it by removing the two front drivers. As you can see from the track plan, I’ve got some mighty tight turns that were just too much for that long wheelbase.

This locomotive is battery driven, and Bachmann put the batteries in the boiler. Well, I can’t reduce the size of the battery box, but there’ s plenty of room at the front end of the boiler. There’s a circuit card up there that manages the remote control. Goodbye. I removed about two inches from the boiler forward of the battery box, editing out the forward dome. Of course, AFTER I’d cut the beast apart I realized that there was a gentle taper from the steam dome to the forward rib. Well, there’s not one of those on MY engine!

That cab is the correct height for a 1/18 fellow to stand upright in the center. What’s interesting about it is the rib structure for the roof. Eventually it will be planked completely, but I wanted to show you the planking process. Do you see the individual strips in that third shot? Recognize them?

Coffee stir-sticks. Yes, stir-sticks. These are six inches long by a quarter inch wide…perfect planks. And boy, are they cheap! You can get a box with a thousand of them in there for four bucks from Smart and Final! The sides of the cab will feature wider planking, and that will be made from popsicle sticks! The ribs for the roof are from wider popsicle sticks, Micheal’s sells them as Craft Sticks, and you can get a big box for about five bucks.

Popsicle and stir-sticks seem to be the ultimate in cheap, extremely useful building materials. They make terrific planks. Glue four stir-sticks edge to edge in a square and you have a beam. Glue two craft sticks to stir-sticks forming a box and you have a 4×12 beam! The popsicle sticks make great clapboarding on buildings, too!

Although the sticks perform well with Alene’s Tacky Glue, we’re working outside. Epoxy, my friend. I’m using Five Minute Epoxy from ITW Performance Polymers. Five minutes is a pretty good fiddle time, and it cures in an hour to a super hard bond. It’s sandable, and holds paint well.

There are only two caveats to using cheapo wooden popsicle and coffee stir sticks; sand them before you paint them (they’re often coated with a light wax to keep them from absorbing your popsicle juice and coffee), and make sure you drill pilot holes before using nails or spikes – they are the very most bargain-basement quality of wood, and you can often split them just by looking at them too hard!

There you go! Three things in one posting; an honest admission of failure, a cool Hollywood story, and a super cheap, easy to use building material. What more could you want? I know, I know, concrete!