Poolside Rails

“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!”

“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!

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!

Okay, well, maybe it’s not a tragedy per se, but it’s a great picture, huh?

Today is very first day of January in the Year ’10, and my wife and my littlest one went down to Pasadena to watch the Rose Parade. Unlike the gazillions of people who brave the predawn hours and freezing cold to be the first to sit on the coooollllldddd concrete sidewalks and gawk and stare at the floats, we usually leave our home in Ventura at a respectable 8:30 in the morning. It takes a little over an hour to get to Pasadena from here, but the Rose Parade moves very slowly. By the time we get to our spot, which is about two miles from where the parade starts, it’s about 10:00, and the parade is just arriving! The crowds are thinner, the parade is still going, and everybody’s happy. Except this time, when we left a little bit late, and the offramp we always use was closed! We missed about half the parade…believe me, the parade is very cool to watch, but a little of it goes a long way, so no hearts were broken.

Anyway, we didn’t get home until late this afternoon. It being the very beginning of a new year, I decided to try the Bachmann Not-So-Big-Hauler in the China Section. The rails are a little dirty what with the plantings and the rain, but a quick skaboodle with a paintbrush at least got the leaves off of ‘em!

But the China Turnout proved to be a major challenge.

As you may have read in a previous post, the coupler on the aft end of the Bachmann NSBH (Not-So-Big Hauler) isn’t  a coupler at all but a down-pointing hook which lies too close to the locomotive for the LGB passenger cars’ loop coupler to attach. To fix it, just for today’s run, I used a piece of wire, tied around the LGB’s coupler and formed into a loop for the NSBH’s hook. It worked okay going forward, but going backwards, of course, the wire collapsed…rather like pushing a rope, I’m afraid.

The wire was still acceptable until we reached the China Turnout.  The Troublesome Truck, the red coach, popped over the frog in the turnout and rolled off the rails.  Now, it could have just slipped off the rails and stopped. That would be a nice thing to do. No sir, that didn’t happen. It slipped off the rails all right, but then it rocked from side to side and pitched itself off the raised railway and down the 3 or so feet to the stone walkway below. Kapow!

The problem with the turnout, which I cleaned thoroughly with a paintbrush, turned out to be dirt. Not between the rails, mind you, but underneath, outside the rails, where the actuator bar travels. Dirt built up under there and counter-acted the spring in the switch mechanism, leaving the closure rail just about 1/64 of an inch open…just enough to pop the LGB off the tracks!

Well, no harm done, really, beyond a significant increase in the engineer’s blood pressure and a hint of blue air from all of the French Invective released by yours truly.

After a good little digging with the back end of the paintbrush the problem was cleared up. As you can see, the LGB coaches and the NSBH made it safely across the China Bridge safely.

See? What’s a new year without a little tragedy, a little swearing, and a happy resolution?

Happy New Year to You! I hope all your tragedies are little, and can be resolved with the back end of a paintbrush!

Yes, you read right, my friend. If you saw the earlier post called Tough Times you’ll know that the Bachmann N-S-B-H took a dive from about three feet and landed with a horrific CRAACK on the concrete walkway. After picking ‘er up and checking things out I found no major physical damage, but the motor, she no work. Headlight works. Motor: nope.

I don’t mind telling you I was a trifle dispirited by that turn of events.  Here I hadn’t even finished the tank modification and I’d already blown up the radio.
But this weekend I decided to take the bull by the tail and face the situation.

With my trusty GE multimeter in hand I tackled the beast, trying to figure out what went wrong.  It turns out the problem had to do with the battery door …if you’ve ever seen the battery door on the Bachmann Big Hauler you’d be amazed at how robust that thing is. The batteries, six D cells, are stored in the boiler, so the battery door is actually the back end of the boiler itself. It has thick lugs that look like they were adapted from a submarine hatch that hold it in place.  Anyway, one of those broke off. Actually, it didn’t so much break off as the cement joint broke and it popped off. Two-part, five-minute epoxy put that sucker back on. All fixed!

So, whilst I was at that fixing thing, I decided to finish the modification…I know, that seems radical, but I decided what the hey: it’s taken long enough already. The grating over the top of the tanks is made from plastic canvas (stolen from my wife’s sewing basket…shhh, don’t tell!) and is glued down with more of the five-minute epoxy. I made the little hatches out of sheet styrene and stuck ‘em down with CA glue.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: you stuck the details onto a pre-painted piece of plastic? Are you nuts? You know that you can’t use acrylic glue on painted surfaces because the glue sticks to the paint, not the surface.

Well, the plastic canvas is made of polyethylene, which, as you know,  is the slickest, bendable-est, most difficult plastic to work with on the planet. Here’s what I did; I laid down a thick sheet of epoxy goo on top of the tanks, and then seated the canvas in it so that the epoxy gushed through some of the holes in it. This, when dry, rather locked the canvas into the epoxy. Then I sprayed the crackers out of it with black Rust-Oleum. The CA glue I used is a gel, and, like the epoxy, reached through the coruscations (it’s a word: look it up) in the canvas. The paint eliminated the slickness of the plastic whilst the gel anchored around the canvas. This is brilliant, if I must say so myself, and I must, for certainly no one else will say it.

Now, don’t be put off by that groovy purple paint. I just wanted to see what she’d look like with a black boiler nose and running gear and a colored everything else. The purple part of the loco will be either Chinese red or that rich chocolate-pudding brown we started with. Pretty cool, huh?

Here’s the kicker: IT WORKS!!!!

Now, in Southern California it doesn’t rain much. In fact it hardly rains at all. So when we get a rainstorm, it’s a big deal, and it reminds us that garden railroading is REAL railroading.

If you’ve been following along, you know that we were able to get a small deal of electrification via overhead wire in the Parisian Loop…not a lot, just enough to test the theory. We were able to install some nice looking telephone poles, too.  They weren’t permanently mounted, of course, as they were really installed just to test the theory of overhead electrification in a garden railway setting.

You’re probably also aware that we installed that nifty Styrofoam road bridge down there in the China Section, and planted the new hill down there, too. Yessir, we’ve made some improvements on the old Paris to Peking Railway.

And then the rains came. And then The Idiot Came. And then it rained again. And then King Louis the cat dashed through the power lines. And then it rained again.  Then Polly Pockets wanted to play in the pool inside the DRG&W gondola. And then it rained again.

On real railroads, everything is build to withstand the rain, because it rains on the real railroads. It snows on ‘em, and a myriad other things happen, too.  When I had my HO scale roundy-round in the basement, I made a nifty little section that simulated a rainy day…glossy streets, puddles, etc.

On the Garden Railway, of course, one must prepare for rain as well. Otherwise one gets that which I have gotten; a mess!

Now, I can deal with the gon filled with water…that’s my mistake for leaving it out there…didn’t even think about it until I spotted my nice brown car pool (get it? Car? Pool? Eh, it’s been done!).

The warped boards in front of the Pola railway station actually look most realistic…somebody should fire that maintenance guy!

But it’s the power poles, one of which got broken during a fray between King Louis and The Idiot, that have rather sunk my spirits. It’s tragic.  I’m pretty sure Godzilla didn’t break any power poles…remember that scene in the original movie where he gets all tangled up in the Tokyo power grid? It was the wires, my friend, not the poles, that did him in.

And then, just to make sure I really messed everything up, I decided it was a good idea to test the Bachmann Not-So-Big Hauler on the short Parisian Section…that’s the part where there is no track because Mr. Ding-dong got all excited about replacing the rails and ripped up the roadbed, track included. Then the money ran out. Oops.

So, zoom of zooms, the little black-painted 4-4-0 dashed through the Parisian Turnout and down the short straightaway…I reversed the wheels before I hit the end of the track, because,  hey, you don’t want to run off the track. But the tracks were still wet, you see. There was a glorious dive , and then the CRACCCCK of a heavy-gauge locomotive landing on its temporary sides on a concrete walkway from a height of about three feet. Ouch.

Tough times, my friend, tough times.

This post is unique in a number of ways, but most importantly that it was written on a Blackberry. Oh, how 21st Century-ish!

It seems Old Bessie the Desktop Behemoth has picked up a bit of a bug…darn thing won’t boot up without incessantly running CHKDSK after starting Windows. It was annoying the first time, frustrating the second, and INFURIATING!!! the third!

Well, I’ve shown Old Bessie! While my Windows OS disk spins merrily away in the E drive I’m sitting next to the heater with my wee little Blackberry, typing away as happily as you please! Hey, Bessie! CHK this DSK!

But that’s not the point of this post…nosiree Bob! Just looka those pics and tell me what ya’all see!

Those, my friend, are tanks…nice, rectangular tanks, carrying water and fuel oil and perhaps oolong tea…

Dang! I just “repaired” the Windows installation, and now it wants to boot up again! Grrrrrr….stupid Windows! Sure it works great for, like, 99.9% of the time, but I’m sleepy, I want to get this done, and, frankly, I’ve gotten a better offer! Well, we’ll just reload old Mr. Windows on Old Bessie and see who checks who’s disk!

So, take a guess as to what material your skin-flinty Mr. Turner used for those tanks…take a good look and you’ll see it…Cassette case? Nope, too small. CD crystal case? Nope, too thin…tick, tick, tick…BZZZZT! The correct answer: video cassettes!

Video cassettes are made out a nice, heavy plastic that, when taken apart, exactly match the depth required on the Bachmann Not-So-Big Hauler. Not only that, but they’re big enough that you can cut opposing sides of each tank from the same cassette. Better yet, you can reasonably eliminate a video tape you’d rather not have your kids see…ahem.

The left side tank came from a video of stupid stuff I shot 20 years ago when I thought I was a hotshot videographer. Talk about embarrassing footage! The right side tank is an annoying Veggie Tales video that was bad in 1992. The “edited” video cassettes make a nice, trim little tanky-looking package, don’t they?

Hot Dog! Back on the PC again…I opened Windows in Safe Mode and ran System Restore. Whatever I loaded, and I think it was, of all the things, updated software for the Blackberry…ah, insidious technologies!…must have tangled up the Windows OS. It’s better now!

Anyway, I unscrewed the video cassettes and broke them into two halves, and then cut the proper profile out of opposing corners of each half. By rotating the corners and gluing them together, I was able to acquire nice, smooth(ish), industrial-looking tanks.

They are glued to the sides of the locomotive body…no, they’re not as heavy as blocks of wood, but they’re plenty secure.  A quick coat of black Rust-Oleum, and, voila, tanks!

Now we have a radio controlled, short wheelbase, European profile 4-4-0 tank locomotive! The only problem now is that the coupler on the back end of the Bachmann is really just a big ugly hook. And the darn thing is so close to the locomotive’s frame that it really cinches the following car up tight! Have to work on that!

“What’s this about a spy?” gags the CEO on his brandy, “in our midst?”

“Yes,” the PR Guy shouts, “a SPY in our yards! Just look at these scandalous photos!”

“I’ve seen better,” mutters the Chief Engineer.

“Well, now, I say, that’s the Bachmann Big Hauler, isn’t it?” asks the CEO.

“Not so bloody big-hauler,” say s the Chief Engineer.

“Yes, yes it is,” stammers the PR Guy in his excitement. “But look again…it’s changed. That SPY must have gotten right next to it!”

“Is that masking tape?” queries the CFO. “Cheap masking tape? I hope so!”

“Isn’t it MYSTERIOUS?” asks the PR Guy.

“What’s mysterious is why you still have a job,” mutters the Chief Engineer.

“Who could these SPIES be?” continues the PR Guy, his spirits undampened by the harsh and thoughtless Chief Engineer.

“Frankly, I don’t see why you keep yelling the word ’spies’”,  says the CEO. “We get the idea; some blighter has taken photos of our Bachmann Not-S0-Big Hauler.”

“But look, Chief,” says the PR Guy, “look at those tanks! Doesn’t that pique your interest?”

“I’ll pique your nose with my fist if you don’t shut up,” says the Chief Engineer. He’s well into his fifth stout.

“All right you guys, come on, now,” whines the PR Guy. “You guys aren’t playing along on this thing at all.  The word SPY is supposed to generate interest in our readers…make ‘em pay attention to what’s going on in the yards at the Paris to Peking Railway, see? Spies are edgy… cool, you know?”

“Oh, I get it,” says the CEO, “it’s a publicity stunt, like cramming college kids into lemonade stands, or pitchers, or something like that!”

“Yes!” The PR Guy is delighted someone gets it. “Exactly like that! If our readers think we have spies in our yards, they’ll think we’ve got something cool to talk about!”

“Let ‘em talk aboot this,” slurs the Chief Engineer. “You’re an idiot.”

All right, I’ll tell you the truth: Ferrari S.A. didn’t actually donate a radio, nor did Ferrari USA. But you have to admit that’s a pretty impressive headline.

The donating Ferrari, in fact, was a really neat looking 1/20th scale red Enzo manufactured by Meijiaxin Toys Company, LTD (you can find them at www.mjxtoys.com).  It’s a remote control toy car my brother and I picked up at Toys R Us for $25…a little steeper than I was willing to pay for this project, but the cheaper units didn’t appear to have any speed control, just forward and reverse.

The project, of course, is the seemingly never-ending conversion of the Bachmann Big Hauler 4-6-0 to a Bachmann Not-So-Big Hauler 4-4-0 that will be able to negotiate the tight radius turns on the Paris to Peking Railway. In hacking the two inches out of the frame length to shorten the wheelbase, I had to hack two inches out of the boiler to match.  The Big Hauler’s PC board, which accommodated not just the receiver but also sound, was three inches long and sat in the boiler…with the boiler shortened, there is now no place for the board to fit!

All right, I’ll tell you the truth: when I first started on this project I just tore into the boiler, cutting wires and pulling out pieces until I got it to the length I wanted. One of the victims of that violent attack was that PC board. I believe it works, but it’s been shorn of its wires, and now, truly, no longer fits.

But the Ferrari board is just a little one-incher. Not only that, but the Ferrari has neat LED headlights that work! We were concerned, my brother and I, that the six D Cell batteries might overpower the little board, which was designed to handle the juice from just 4 AA batteries.  As you can see from the picture, we need not have worried. Everything seems to be working fine.

All right, I’ll tell you the truth:  I didn’t do the installation myself. My brother did the electronic work quickly and excellently.  He was able to get the board to fit into the stubby front end of the boiler so that access to the power switch is gained by popping off the press-fit boiler end plate. It strikes me as rather funny that one end of the boiler pops off to reveal the board and the switch, while the other end of the boiler pops off to allow access to the batteries. Like a real locomotive, the entire structure of the boiler is in use, between the batteries and the radio. No fake empty spaces here!

The beast runs pretty well. The motion is a little herky-jerky every now and again, but I think that’s because we crammed the antenna alongside the batteries in the boiler, right over the motor. There may be a lot of EMF interference in there.  The original Big Hauler runs the antenna around the inside of the cab roof…maybe we’ll do something like that.

The idea for this project came from Kalmbach’s Tips & Tricks for your garden railway,  a supplement that came with my subscription to Garden Railways magazine.  It was inexpensive, easy (well, for me, because I didn’t do it!), and effective…the darn thing actually works!

There is just one little issue; the R/C Ferrari was designed to blink its headlights when running backwards. Take a guess at what happens to the Not-So-Big Hauler’s light in reverse!