Poolside Rails

“Just toss up a Styrofoam facade,” Bill Dimcheep, the Paris to Peking Railway’s new chief architect says. “It’s quick, it’s easy, it’s cheap, and, hey, it’ll probably keep standing!”

While the board’s thunderous applaud echoes around the room, the PR Guy takes furious notes, looking for a way to package quick, easy and cheap so that it sounds like durable and economical to the stockholders.

Building a quick and easy facade seemed almost embarrassing in its simplicity. As the problem with the existing Kazakhstan bridge is only one of appearance, why go through the hassle and expense of replacing it? Why not just apply a simple Styrofoam sheet facade? We’ve got some nice ‘foam here, even though it is of the popcorn variety, not the good blue stuff. We’ve got some glue, some scrap wood, and some good ol’ American know-how. What the hey? Why not?

I had to work at the offices of the Evil Empire on Saturday, so my bridge building day was Sunday. Sunday was also the drain clearing day, the clean the garage day, and the fix the rabbit shed so that it doesn’t leak so badly on the few rainy days of the year day. I’m not complaining, mind you, although I do miss that Saturday. This coming Saturday is open, and I’m expecting to do great things…lord knows I didn’t do ‘em on Sunday.

Anyway, it was windy on Sunday. Not breezy, but out and out tear-the-siding-off-grandma’s-house windy. There was so much wind, in fact, that my ‘foam facade rather folded in half when I was dry-fitting it. Years ago my nephew and I took a Sevylor inflatable raft out to the Ventura breakwater. It was a really choppy day, and the sea was pounding over the breakwater, causing yours truly a great deal of trepidation. My nephew, however, thought it was great, and said “dude, this boat folds like a taco!” So, my ‘foam facade, too, folded like a taco!

I have a nice supply of 1x.5×9 inch slats from an old shelving unit in my wood collection. My wife calls it the woodpile, but that’s because she doesn’t use the wood. If she did, she would appreciate its utility. I believe she has a yarnpile. My daughter was playing with the LGB passenger cars on the railway, and I was staring at my folded over facade. She suggested I put some wood behind the ‘foam, and, voila, an idea was born! Why not reinforce the ‘foam!

Because it’s a buttload of work, that’s why! The slats fit perfectly behind the ‘foam structure. They’re glued to the ‘foam, and then screwed to one another. I used my staple gun to attach the ‘foam to the wood from the front, very carefully shooting staples in the grout lines between the bricks so that they wouldn’t show. I got about 14 staples in before I realized that I was shooting ¼ inch staples through ½ inch ‘foam! What we have here is a failure to penetrate!

But I found some crappy old galvanized steel staples that you drive in with a hammer…those guys’ll go through anything!

My little girl helped me with screwing the wood together, explaining that she was a good screwer…it took all my control to leave that one alone.

So, the sun set on Sunday, hours of labor went into the building the framing behind the facade, scribing the facade, hammering in those crummy staples to keep it together, and dang if I don’t have enough ‘foam to complete the inside of the arches! All that work and ran out of materials!

The clutch blew out on the Isuzu today, and will cost most of my house payment to repair. The budget and finance committee is going to have a hard time justifying any railroad purchase, due to the overwhelming financial burden caused by this automotive failure. Dang.

So, quick it aint, easy it aint, and now it aint going to be cheap! Darn you, Bill Dimcheep!

“Now, let’s have your name again, please?” the CEO leans forward across the boardroom table, almost spilling his brandy.

“Bill,” the applicant for the Chief Architect job says, crunching his cigar. “Bill Dimcheep.”

“Well,” the CEO slaps the table, “I like the sound of that!”

“My motto is ‘Why waste money on quality?’” Bill pulls the cigar out of his mouth and smiles broadly at the assembled boardmembers. He’s not a tall man, and quite round. His natty green pinstripe suite makes him look rather like a melon with a grape on top. A bald grape at that.

“Yes,” the gruff CFO looks closely at Bill’s business card, “I see your trade phrase here is ‘Buildings for Tomorrow, and Probably the Day After’. Hmph. I’m not so sure…”

“Poppycock!” The CEO stands up. “I like this fellow! You, sir, are HIRED! Gentlemen, may I present our new Chief Architect, Bill Dimcheep!”

My brother looked at my plan for the Kazakhstan Bridge in the last post and came up with a brilliant suggestion; instead of cutting squares of Styrofoam and stacking them up to build the bridge, why not just cut a whoppin’ big Styrofoam facade? It would take far less ‘foam, and only we initiated folks would know! I’ve attributed the idea to Bill Dimcheep.

“Plus, since it’s just a facade,” Bill pops the cigar out of his little mouth and waves it around for effect, “you only gotta build one side! Nobody’s going to look on the back side of a bridge!”

“B..b.but that bridge is nay safe!” stammers the Chief Engineer.

“Poppycock again, I say” the CEO blasts. “It’s perfectly safe…it just looks ugly, and this will fix that. This will put it into scale!”

“Oh,” pops the PR Guy, “I like that. New Construction Method Scales Down Bridge Problem! I’ll get on that right away.”

Well, I happen to have just enough of the Popcorn Flavor White Styrofoam to build the facade. I have almost exactly enough, although, because of the shape of the ‘foam, I’ll have two pieces and a big seam…I’ll fix it with a drain pipe or something.

Now, this white ‘foam is a little tricky to cut; don’t treat it like styrene or you’ll have a popcorn snowfall. Instead, jam that old knife right on through both sides and cut it like a man…make sure your blade is sharp and GO TO!

I used the end of an “L” bracket from some other project to emboss the shape of the stones into the face of the ‘foam. The stone blocks are two inches wide by one inch tall, and, my God, it took forever to get ‘em in there, but, once done, look pretty snappy!

Pictured is about 60% of the entire facade…the remaining piece of ‘foam has yet to be treated.

Puzzle Part Two: how to attach said facade to said existing bridge structure.

Oddly, Bill Dimcheep hasn’t said much about that!

So, how much do you know about Kazakhstan? Yes, you’re right, it is the ninth largest country in the world, and is the largest landlocked nation on the planet. Yep, it’s the home of the Baikonur Cosmodrome and the Soviet’s primary nuclear weapon testing site.

But let’s roll the clock back to good old 1910. Although not so good for Kazakhstanis, it was part of the Russian Empire. Huge, rural, with massive natural resources, and a great big part of the ride to Peking from Paris.

You’re Hinton Bartholomew, Chief Architect on the P-to-P line, and you’ve got to span the Darya River, and your bridge has to stand up under little to no maintenance. Although the forests are rich with timber, wooden bridges take a lot of work to keep standing. What’s your building material? Stone, of course, right out of the local mountains! It might take some labor to build it, but once it’s done it’s a maintenance-free structure that’s going to stand for a hundred years.

Okay, so much for the real-world fantasy. We know Garden Railroading is Real Railroading, so it’s nice to have a back-story for our decisions. But, let’s get to work, shall we?

The current issue of Garden Railroading Magazine has a very cool article on using sheet Styrofoam to build convincing stone bridges. Of course one could use real stones, but what’s the fun in that? Plus you have to stick the stones together, and that involves mortar and real work. No, sir, let’s just consider this Styrofoam thingy.

Now, the Kazakhstan bridge as it stands today is an eyesore. Oh, sure, it’s wooden, and it’s quaint, and all that stuff. But it spans a positively HUGE gap with no middle support. In fact, the darn thing bows down in the center ever so slightly…just like real!

I’ve been fighting a battle with asparagus fern…you pay big bucks for this plant at your local greenery store…but I hate it. It grows in long, thorny tendrils precisely where I don’t want it to grow. And the tendrils are woody and hard to get rid of and in fact it grows in big nasty root balls that are a gazillion feet from where you’d think it would be and you end up tearing up your railway to get to the root ball that turns out to be just one of a bazillion of the darn things…reminds me of a joke: George Bush is approached by one of his advisors who tells him that five Brazilian soldiers were killed. “My God,” he replies, “how many is a Brazilian?” But I digress. The A-fern likes to grow through the ties on the current bridge, and I hate it. It won’t grow in Styrofoam, which is the best reason I can think of to build the bridge this way!

Now, there’s a cool program called Gimp 2 that you can just plain get for free that is among the best image manipulators I’ve seen out there. Did I mention you can get it for free? Well, I used Gimp to manipulator my picture of that ghastly bridge, turning it into a work of art, if I do say so myself:

Instead of cutting bridge sides and a deck out of one big old piece of ‘foam, this author’s idea was to cut the ‘foam into the individual layers of stone that make up the bridge. It’s a really good idea, because, at the end of the day, the weight of the rails and the passing train actually rests on the flat side of the ‘foam, not the edge…much more reliable and sturdy.

Although his was made of blue foam, the good stuff, I have the white “popcorn” version on hand. I’ll show you a picture of the progress as it, well, as it progresses!

“What was that?” asks the CEO. He draws ferociously on his cigar. “A success? On our railway?”

“Must be a type,” quips the CFO.

“No, I proofread it twice,” says the PR Guy. “I couldn’t believe it myself!”

As you’ll recall from our previous adventures, we’ve been testing the efficacy of a water-based coating on a Styrofoam structure. Now, before you tut-tut and cluck (if you’re a chicken you may feel free to tut-tut and cluck), let us consider the problem at hand:
A: No funds to hand
II: Paints on hand either a) attack the Styrofoam, or True)run right off it
3: This attempt at a silly numbering scheme isn’t working at all! But you        can see what I was trying for, can’t you?

I figure we’re learning this garden railway building thing together, am I right? I reckon we’re learning this blogging thing together too, aren’t we? I mean, really, who knows anything about blogs except folks like us that are flying by the seat of our pants? So we may as well learn about comedy writing together too, huh? Kind of follows, doesn’t it? I think our lesson for today is to jump ship when a premise doesn’t work.  Nobody likes to see a writer beat a dead horse. Or a live horse. It’s just not pretty. So, when your idea doesn’t stand up, knock it down.  If you have to work to explain your premise chances are good it’s too arcane for the average reader. Arcane. Look it up.

Anyway, it rained on my China Bridge, the 7th Wonder of the Styrofoam world. The wonder, of course, is how something so shoddily built can still be standing! The north side of the bridge is covered in a super thick paste of “heavy” acrylic paint…that’s the paint from the bottom of the bottle, with most of the water removed. I stippled it onto the ol’ Styro to see if it would stick…it Stuck! The south side is a combination of the stipple method and a plaster of Paris slurry I shlopped on there. The deck itself features only the P of P slurry.

And the winner…I’ll tell you in a minute. I was just thinking about that snide joke about the bridge being shoddily  built. I think I’ve fallen into a rather bad crevasse, and I could use your help in getting out of it.

I’m always testing ideas. Like the Bachmann Not-So-Big Hauler. It’s a huge pile of tests; can you put a car R/C into a battery powered locomotive? Can you shorten the wheelbase on a locomotive and have it work? Will a shortened-wheelbase heavy locomotive cure the China Section track issues? Can you make an American prototype look European? For the testbed, however, the only heavyweight battery driven loco I have IS the Bachmann Big Hauler. So I wiped out a perfectly good machine to test an idea.

Fortunately, the test is working.

With dang near zero funding, though, my test units become the real deal. Like this bridge. It’s just a test to see how Styrofoam works. Because it’s a test I rather slapped it together…who’s going to waste time finishing a test that may not work? But the test appears to be working, and now I’ve got a durable finish on it. Well, now it’s a shame to waste all the work I put into that finish.  So here I am putting a good finish on a slap-dash construction. You see the problem? It’s rather horse-and-cartish, if you know what I mean.

And now the answer to the better finish: the acrylic “mud” that was stippled on. That dried in a tough, leathery surface that, as I had hoped, snugged itself down around the Styrofoam. The plaster slurry, particularly on the roadbed, seems to want to jump off the plastic of the bridge.

So, what did we learn?
A: Stupid numbering schemes aren’t funny and are hard to do
B: Keep tests simple and small, and avoid the temptation to cut up good  things to test theories
C: A slurry of “heavy” acrylic paint will stick when applied in a thick stipple pattern

Now comes the debate about whether or not to keep the existing bridge structure or replace it with something…something more…well, neater, for one thing! I’ll let you know!

You see, the headline’s supposed to be a pun about missing teeth…you, know, bridgework? Get It? No? Skip it.

As you know, we’ve abandoned nasty, scary plywood with spider egg sacs for clean, white, efficient Styrofoam.  Last week it was an idea, and this week, zoom, zip, kabam, it’s a bridge!

There’s an interesting life lesson here. Garden railroading, as you know, is real railroading, which means the lessons one learns in garden railroading must apply to real life. Rather “I am therefore I think” logic, but it gets the job done.

I’ve been putting this bridge project off forever because I don’t know anything about working seriously with Styrofoam.  Like everyone else I’ve hacked at it and swept up those little white pills that cling so statically to just about everything…won’t even dump out of the dustpan because they’re so electrically charged they can’t let go. But I have this glowing memory of my stepson in the 4th grade…here in California our 4th graders learn about the California Missions, and are required to build a model of one. It’s  a big business for Michael’s…the craft store sells Styrofoam kits of each of the missions, complete with little fountains and stuff like that. We took my stepson’s kit from Michaels and coated it with this interesting yellowish slurry of “heavy” acrylic…acrylic paint from the bottom of the bottle that hasn’t been mixed. The result looked very much like stucco.  But that’s not the point of the story.

The point of the story is this; Walt Disney said the difference between someone who dreams and someone who lives their dreams is that the person who lives their dreams actually does it. Or maybe it was if you want to do something, do it. Now I don’t remember what it was. Dang. It was a good one. I fall for those jingo-istic things all the time. There’s no I in teamwork…I get it! But that’s not the point of the story either.

The point of the story is this; yesterday I didn’t have a bridge because all I had to work with was crappy old plywood and outdated tools. By shifting my paradigm and looking at the situation from a different standpoint, today I have a nifty bridge that is pretty near complete.  It took a shift in attitude, but I did it.  Like Captain Kirk and Kobiyashi Maru…if you didn’t see that Star Trek movie, you are forgiven.  The underlying theme of the film is that there is always a third alternative, even if you have to manufacture it. The Kobiyashi Maru was a Star Fleet Academy simulation of a rescue mission…the people taking the simulation did not know that they were destined to fail it because it actually designed to test their response to failing in a critical situation. Captain Kirk was the only guy to make it through the simulation and succeed. He knew he was supposed to pass it and that no one else did, so he hacked the computer system and rigged it so he would succeed. He created a different alternative.

So, when you look at those big wonderful things you’ve always wanted to do, ask yourself this: why aren’t you doing them?  I know you have very valid reasons as to why you’re not, just like the rest of us. But, how can you engineer your circumstances to make it possible? What can you hack, what can you quit, what can you start that will get you moving towards your dream? If you look at it not by saying what can’t be done, but by saying what can, you’ll be amazed at what follows. Trust me.

Proof? I have a nifty bridge down there in my China Section. Is it perfect? Heck no! I have a rough slurry of heavy acrylic paint on the north side, a plaster of Paris roadbed down the center, and a combination of plaster of Paris and slurry coating the south side. But look at it again; yesterday I didn’t have a bridge, today I do.

What changed? I finally got off my duff, faced my fears about the Styrofoam, and built the darned bridge! I expected the project to take months…in reality I was just afraid to commit to doing it.

That is really the point of this whole railway project: I used to be afraid of building my garden railway, because it seemed so big and I know so little.  But we’ve broken it down into little chunks, you and me,  and we’re working those chunks! They’re not so big! We can do it! You can do it!

The bridge is rough, but it looks pretty good. Once my various coatings are dry, I’ll nail it with good old Rust-Oleum and then paint it in earnest. I’m happy with the outline, and I like the arched deck  – that took a lot of quick thinking, but it worked out great.

It’s supposed to rain here in the next couple of days…I’m interested to see what effect the rain will have on my acrylic slurry.  I know it won’ t hurt the Styrofoam…at least I hope not!

I apologize for waxing philosophic, but I have a lot about which to be philosophical these days. Someday I’ll buy you a beer and we’ll sort it all out.
For now, though, let’s just put it this way: the difference between my bridge of yesterday and my bridge of today is that I went and did something about it.  Hint hint hint!

“What’s this?” says the CEO. “Styrofoam?  Isn’t that…well…cheap?”

“We prefer to say it’s economical,” replies the PR Guy.  “We also prefer to use the phrase ‘architectural foam’ in exchange for the banal Styrofoam.

“Banal,” says the Chief Engineer. “Don’t that mean bathroom?”

Well, there you go, sunk to bathroom humor within the first fifty words…it’s got to be a record!

As you may have heard, we abandoned nasty, splintery, naily old plywood in favor of light, smooth, easy to use Styrofoam. Yes, Styrofoam, the king of take-out food materials, has proven itself to be right at home on the garden railway.

Like most wonder materials, however, Styrofoam has some interesting quirks that take a little getting used to. For one thing, it’s messy. For another, it ain’t natural, folks, so be prepared to leave the green road. But once you get the hang of it you are in for an interesting treat.

I think I bought the wrong Styrofoam for my project.  I’ve read where other modelers have used architectural foam to great success. Theirs, however, is that dense cell blue stuff. I went to Lowe’s and bought a couple of sheets of what looked like architectural foam to me…4×8 sheets of white foam. When I got it home, though, I realized it’s just plain old Styrofoam , the kind your Chinese food comes home in, sandwiched between two thin plastic sheets. I was gravely disappointed, until I started working with it. Trust me, you’ll like it.

Cutting this laminate Styrofoam is easy, and no special tools are required.   If you’ve ever tried to cut plain old Styrofoam (like the kind that they packed around your new 8-Track player) with a knife, you know you’ll get Snowfall Over the Alleghenies; white pepper-corn dandruff that goes everywhere.   Expecting the worst, I used the quasi-sharp knife blade in my trusty Leatherman tool. Because of that plastic sheet laminate, this stuff cuts smoothly and retains a reasonably clean edge…you can cut freehand curves and everything!

But here’s the thing: you gotta cut this stuff like a man. Don’t treat it like styrene, you know, where you make a shallow cut and then go back over it. Doing that here breaks through the laminate and exposes the white dandruff. Go straight at this stuff. Drive your knife all the way through both sides and cut it with a gentle sawing motion. You’ll find that it cuts like a dream.

You can make it curve, like inside the arch of my railroad bridge, by cutting through the Styrofoam from one side all the way down to the laminate on the other side. I cut through the laminate on one side and about halfway through the foam itself. Making sure to leave the laminate on the other side intact, I broke the Styrofoam along my cut lines. The uncut laminate acts kind of like a hinge and allows you to build remarkably smooth curvy things.

The ancient tool, fire, can be used to anneal the edges of my Styrofoam pieces. A candle did a nice job of slightly melting the edges, closing gaps between the large cells of the foam and making ‘em stick together.

Now, sticking is an issue. My current favorite adhesive is Plumber’s Goop. It works great and holds super strong to the laminate sheet. But it is unbelievably aggressive towards the unprotected Styrofoam.  As the foam is naturally anhydrous…

“How can Styrofoam be ‘naturally’ anything?” mutters the Chief Engineer.

“Shush,” says the CEO as he lights a cigar. “Let’s just go with it.”

…and is extremely reactive to toluene-based adhesives, your choices are kind of limited. I cheated, and you might want to as well. I used dopey old Elmer’s Glue, knowing that it’ll work like a stick-um, and then screwed the pieces of my bridge together with gnarly 3 inch long deck screws. The thing is sturdy!

Oil-based paints, too, will attack the Styrofoam itself, although I’m rather certain they’ll stick just fine to the laminated sides. Water-based paints won’t stick, and oil-based paints will attack. What to do?  Well, again, I cheated. I used straight water-based acrylics, but I didn’t mix ‘em first. I used the colored sludge at the bottom of the bottles. And I didn’t brush it on: I stippled it on. The thickness that comes from stippling the super-heavy paint makes it work kind of like a glue. All I’m trying to do with my acrylics is get a coating over the bare Styrofoam so that I can use enamels on it…my thinking is that the acrylics will protect the Styrofoam while the enamels protect the acrylics. I’ll let you know what happens.

Here’s the beauty of the Styrofoam: it cuts easily, holds its shape, and forgives your sloppy workmanship. You don’t need a scary power tool to cut it, and mega-projects like this bridge go together in the blink of an eye!

If you’ve been following along, you may remember that we built a bridge in China…well, not in China, the real China, but in the China Section of the Paris to Peking Railway.

I had cut the thing out of nasty old plywood I rescued from the detritus generated by the removal of the roof over my patio.

There’s kind of a funny story that goes along with this bridge and that detritus: my wife and I were both unemployed at the time, but had agreed to marshal some of our meager funds together to splurge on a dumpster for the detritus from the roof.  We could only afford one dump of the dumpster. While I was up there tearing down this monstrous roofing project of something like 12×30 feet of double thick plywood covered with tarpaper and four hundred thousand nails, my wife was cutting back the foliage on the trees around the house.  It was mid spring and hotter than the bloody blue blazes and the plywood was super heavy and really nailed down in so many places I used a circular saw to cut it into little pieces rather than waste time fighting all that steel.  My wife expended similar energy on her pruning project – so much so that when the dumpster came there were huge piles of chopped down greenery surrounding the house. As the piles of pruning were obvious to the neighbors and passers-by and actually extended onto the sidewalk in several places, and as I had been  very careful to keep the junk from the roof in our own backyard, just take a guess which project utilized our only pass at the dumpster. Go ahead and guess – I’ll wait. I still, to this very day, have massive stacks of quasi-chopped up plywood in my backyard!

Late this summer my wife announced we could afford another run at the dumpster concept…she’s tired, you see, of stepping around the vast pile of naily, scary, tarpapery plywood chunks and the seven and half million black widows living under it.

Under the threat of impending dumpsterdom it suddenly became imperative to use up as much of that plywood as I could salvage before the dumpster arrived. That was two months ago.  No dumpster yet.

Anyway, that’s the story behind the crummy plywood used in the China Section Bridge.  When  I made the first measurements for the bridge, I figured 18 inches is plenty of height  for the center of bridge…six inches of span above a portal that was a foot high. When I set the completed structure on the railway, however, it looked absolutely absurd.  What was I thinking? How tall are these trains?

Today I used the Hitachi circular saw to drop the bridge by about four inches. As you can see, it looks much better, although height continues to be an issue. I’m afraid the problem is in that six inches above the portal…at two feet to the inch, that’s a twelve foot tall cross section on the bridge. Why would you build a bridge that massive for a road over the railway?

This is half-inch plywood – nice and stiff, and durable as the day is long. And as much of a pain in the keester to cut as anything! I’m looking at that schwoopie top edge of the bridge….THAT’s what  I have to re-cut, moving it down to just three inches above the top of the portal. The only power tool I have to do that is my father-in-law’s really scary jigsaw, and it doesn’t like that material.

Here’s what I’m thinking. I may be wrong, correct me if I’m right. This bridge carries no weight – it’s just for show. Why, for heaven’s sake, do I have to continue working with this nasty plywood? What if I decided to donate the plywood to the Dumpster Gods and instead carved the bridge out of foam? It doesn’t rot if you coat it with a good heavy paint, it’s lightweight and easy to cut, and DANG if that isn’t what we’ll do!

Thanks for working with me on this.  I knew I could rely on your insight to help me figure this out.

FOAM! The miracle material! Maybe it’ll replace popsicle sticks and plywood altogether!

Nawp, maybe not.

Okay, I’ll admit it. The bridge looks stupid. Just for the record, my seven year old told me she thought it looked cool.

“Why in heaven’s name did you build it so big?” the CEO asks, coughing out a perfect smoke ring from his cigar.

“Ye dunna see its true size,” the Chief Engineer chuckles. “Once it’s buried it’ll seem right as rain!”

“Buried?” The gasps go ’round the room.

The Chief Engineer smiles smugly.

I had planned to dig the bridge into the ground from the outset – nothing looks more unrealistic than landscape features set on top of the landscape! Think about mobile homes you’ve seen…those can’t be real!

So last Saturday I was trying to watch cartoons with my little one when my wife announced she was ordering a dumpster to get rid of all the junk I’d pulled down when I tore the roof off of our patio. Junk?!? There’s some good stuff in there.

In all honesty, there’s very little good stuff in there, but to just throw it all away, willy nilly…that’s an odd phrase, isn’t it? Willy nilly. According to Merriam Webster’s it dates back to 1608, and is the contraction of either “will I nill I”, “will he nill he”, or “will ye nill ye”. Well, I for one am certainly glad we cleared that up!

I knew I had to design something fast that would use the one or two still good pieces of wood before the whole pile hit the dumpster, so I designed the bridge, trying my best to avoid doing it in a will he nill he fashion, using a ruler and everything! It turned out to be rather easy.

Translating that plan to the real world of crappy, nail studded plywood proved a little more challenging. Using the dimensions I’d documented in the plan, I drew the outline of one side of the bridge onto a rough, partially painted and splintery piece of plywood. That was the good piece!

I cut the shape out using a combination of my Hitachi circular saw and this really old Groves-Ashland jigsaw that belonged to my late father-in-law. It’s really cool, with a brushed metal body and everything. When it runs it smells like hot machine oil. Cool!

“Ye cut like an ape, y’idiot!” The Chief Engineer does not admire my wood-cutting skills.

Once I’d hacked one side profile out of the crummy plywood I searched and searched until I could find a good piece of plywood big enough to accept the traced outline of that first side. Instead of tracing it carefully I got lazy and raped the environment with my can of purple spray paint, spraying the cutout while it was lying on the new plywood piece. The result was a plywood-colored shadow of the bridge standing out of a cloud of purple.

Although it seemed like a good idea at the time, I subsequently found the contrast between the paint and the wood too low to see clearly when I was cutting with power tools. And I will tell you this: roller coasters have NOTHING on the scary thrill of running that forty-plus year old jigsaw through dusty, splintery, nail-laden junk plywood! Yeeeee-haw! I think I still have all my fingers!

Because I didn’t do a craftsmanlike job of cutting out the first side, and because I only had the purple haze outline as a guide to the second side, the resulting two sides just don’t match up very well.

But, there they are, held apart by a six inch piece of 2 x 2 on either side of the arch. It looks stupid, and it’s too tall. I will dig it into the hillside on either side of the roadbed, but I imagine I’ll cut it down a mite in the center.

“I should say so,” chuckles the CEO.

Everyone’s a critic.

As you’ll recall from yesterday’s episode, I threw a temporary retaining wall around part of the curve in the China Section of the Paris-Peking Railway to prevent landslides from hitting the rails.

What? What name is that? I thought it was the Paris-China Railway! New Name?

Well, I was in downtown Ventura today and was passed by a rally car from around 1910. Aside from wheezing smoke and popping like a two-stroke, it was festooned with signs showing its inclusion in the Paris-Peking Rally. Remember the movie The Great Race, with Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon, Peter Falk, and…was it Leslie Anne Downs? That car reminded me of that movie which reminded me of the Paris-Peking Rallies which are now Paris-Dakar due to the changing political landscape of the Middle East. Phew.

Anyway, I like Paris-Peking Railway. It has a nice ring to it, and rolls trip-trippingly off the tongue. Go ahead, try it: Paris-Peking Railway. Nice, huh? Enough foolishness.

While installing the temporary fence yesterday, I espied with my little blue eye another landslide about three feet north of the one against which I was battling. Aside from feeling just a tinge of defeat, I realized that section of track would need a different treatment.

This new landslide fell from the south side of the track, not the north, and close to the crest of the new mountain. In fact, it fell in precisely the place where I’d planned to install a road bridge.
Well, you know how one thing leads to another, and here we are back in Google SketchUp again. I’ll admit this drawing isn’t the best, but it helps us place the final structure in our minds.

Although Garden Railroad is Real Railroading, sometimes you have to create a little reality to explain why things are the way they are. My story goes that the rail line follows an old wagon road, used by farmers and villagers alike passing to and from market. Because of the lay of the land, however, it was subject to flooding. SO, when the emperor chose the route for his royal highway, he chose to build a stone bridge over the old road rather than dip his road down to cross it and run the risk of flooding. Yes, it’s a stretch. No, it doesn’t matter. But, it gives us a reason to put a fancy stone bridge along the railway.

The SketchUp model spans a foot at the arch barrel, the inner curve of the bridge. The barrel is also one foot tall. The railings rise three inches above the roadbed. I’m thinking we’ll build the sides out of sheet plywood and cover them with a stone-studded-stucco outer layer. Go ahead, say that three times fast, I’ll way. I imagine we’ll plank the deck of the bridge, running ribs along the inside of the plywood to hold the popsicle stick planks…did I say popsicle sticks? You bet…cheap, durable, and available. We’ll coat the deck with another stucco slurry, perhaps studded with a uniform gravel to look like cobblestone.

The model shows a stone retaining wall. In reality there will be four, one on either side of the track and on either side of the bridge. I haven’t decided on a material for those yet. What would the emperor have used?

As you can see, the Paris-Peking Railway is beginning to take shape. I’ll be happier once the mountain is planted and we can step away from all this retaining wall nonsense!

I have to thank my friend Wyatt. Although I wasn’t there to hear it, I understand his first word upon seeing the Paris-to-China Railway was “wow”. True, Wyatt hasn’t quite made it to preschool yet, but the man knows railroading. He’s Chief Engineer of the Living Room Branch on the Brio Thomas the Tank Engine railroad. Sounds qualified to me!

There are three words a garden railroader with blown up tracks just doesn’t want to hear from a bright, fascinated four-year-old boy: “Does it work?” Ouch. I had to tell him that he’d be the first guy I’ll call as soon as it does work. You gotta love four-year-olds! He simply said “okay” and slid my locomotives around on the silent track nonetheless.

So, to work. Yesterday I posed the question of how to fill the hole left by the broken concrete. Last night the answer came to as if in a dream: sand. Sand will be ideal. Once compacted into place, sand remains compacted. And where dirt turns into mud when wet, sand remains sand.

I used my four-pound Concrete Modification Tool to blow out the last of the concrete that was forcing the rails to rise. That was fun! I compacted the dirt as much as possible at the bottom of the pit left by the concrete, and then poured on the sand. Smacking the rails with a screwdriver while pouring the sand allowed the ties to settle in. I think it will work. There is still a small gap in the north side rail, but the south side rail is now flush.

There’s still a slight hump there that I have to figure out, but my locomotive can make it past the ficus tree for the first time in years! Clearing the rails in the China Section turned out to be rather straightforward, thank goodness. Once those rails were cleared we were able to send my battery-powered New Bright D&RGW 2-6-0 all the way around the China Section.

Sadly, that particular locomotive carries the batteries in the tender, giving it very little tractive weight. It made it all the way around, but popped and jumped at every opportunity. We made progress-halting-but progress. If I had another working locomotive of the battery-powered variety that had the batteries onboard, I’d have run it. That sounds like a tall order, but my “under modification” Bachmann ex-4-6-0 locomotive is just the beast. Soon, my friend, soon.

Three problems still remain in the China Section. Most urgent is that the track is anchored to the ground. Not only is that un-prototypical, it leads to kinks and gauge errors due to the influence of the weather. That will have to be fixed very soon. The ties are actually screwed into the concrete, and the builder poured a concrete slurry around it. All that has to go away.

The second problem is that crummy bridge. It looks okay in the pictures but is frighteningly unrealistic. It also supports a population of hungry little fellows that need to not be roosting in my backyard!

Finally, that mountain MUST get landscaped! My new canine friends seem to enjoy imitating Teddy storming San Juan Hill. In so doing they tumble untold pounds of dirt across the rails. Of course they are excited by the noise of the New Bright 2-6-0, and the young puppy just has to chase it. Planting the mountain should discourage them from using it as a point of attack. Lord, I hope so!

So, at the end of the day, I have to say thank you, Wyatt for your enthusiasm for the PtoC Ry. Your energy prodded me to get those damaged rails fixed and the China Section working.

Next time I see him I’ll be able to answer him “why, yes, it does work! Want to play?”