Poolside Rails

Now that we’re in the New Year, we need to consider new options, new ways of doing things. New designs, new ideas. Let’s move forward, shall we?

As you know, we had the Dreadful Event on Saturday last…the cremated remains came home today in a little gray plastic box. Of course we had to look…it’s not grisly in the least, but something in that ashes-to-ashes thing got to me, and here I am back in the garage hiding…I mean, writing this post.

Anyway, that was Saturday. Sunday we took a trip down to Chinatown in downtown Los Angeles to take our minds off of our troubles. If you’ve never been to the LA Chinatown, then you’ve missed something pretty cool. You have to be in the mood for Chinatown, and, Mister, that mood was there.

There’s a really cool store down there called Wing Hop Fung…it’s kind of like a miniature Walmart except you can’t buy tires or wedding dresses, but, man, they have just about everything else. Well, everything else in the housewares, tea, pre-packaged foods, and fascinating Chinese objet d’art sort of stuff.  They have this horse…the thing is about twelve hundred bucks,  is about the size of big dog, and is simply astounding to look at. It’s made of cast resin, and, somehow, the artist was able to weave a huge number of different colors within the casting…eh, you had to be there. I looked in my wallet – sorry, no $1200 today. Maybe tomorrow.

We were goofing around looking at stuff, and my daughter pointed out this model pagoda. Okay, think of a model pagoda: Sits on your desktop, gets dusty, goes in the trash, right? Ehhhh, wrong answer! This sucker stands a good eight feet tall.

Now, my daughter just lost her best friend. Many’s the time we’d hear voices in Grandma’s room while we were up responding to Nature’s call in the wee small hours of the morning (wee small hours, get it?). Our little one would be sitting in bed with Grandma, and the two of them would be laughing about God only knows what.  On the day of the Dreadful Event she sat with her mother, aunt and I in Grandma’s room and laughed and reminisced about the great lady whose remains still lay in the bed. After a while the little one told us Grandma was getting a little creepy, as she was turning blue. Not long after that the mortuary guys came and toted her away.

Anyway, this spunky little kid says “Look, Daddy, that would go great on our railroad!” What an amazing little person! Moreover, she was right! Looking at the doorways and walkways, my goodness if it didn’t look like it was right around that 1/18th scale mark!

So, I took a couple of shots…fuzzy, yes, crummy, yes, hard…what is this, Bag on Bill day?

Knowing what we know about BLUE Styrofoam, not the white, chippy stuff I bought but the densely packed blue insulation foam, a structure like that would be a piece of cake! The lightness of the foam means you don’t have to worry about structural weight…if you built a simple dowel structure down the center it would undoubtedly stand straight for just about forever! And that densely packed foam should hold the details rather well.

I’ll let you know as soon as I get my hands on the blue ‘foam…the good stuff!

I been thinking about that horse…too small to ride, too expensive to put in the closet, too…Chinesy?…to put on top of the piano. Maybe it looks best in the Wing Hop Fung!

Plan for China House

Well, exciting times have come to the Paris to Peking Railway, haven’t they? Just look at our new surroundings.
Housekeeping first: our new surroundings will result in better information for you. You’ll be seeing more and better links coming in the very near future.
We have new staff to help us accomplish this bold new look…my brother the graphic genius has officially signed onto the railway as the Marketing Director. He is most welcomed!

Important Update: I talked to young China’s mom this morning. China’s vision in the damaged eye has been making a steady recovery…first lights and darks, then shadows, then blurry colors…until today. China told her it was no better today than yesterday. Still, it’s a rapid recovery from a disastrous injury. I thank you, good reader, for your prayers, your concerns, and your well wishes. Her mom asked that I thank you, too.

Okay, back to work. In my panic to use up the remaining plywood before the arrival of the dreaded dumpster I designed this very cool looking China House.

A quick aside: when I tore the roof off of my patio I had nowhere to park the debris. Mind you, this was a big job…20×30 feet of tarpaper-covered plywood laid over 2×6 supports. The guy who put that thing up must have had the hots for the nails saleslady…that sucker had a nail blasted in there just about every half inch. We’d ordered a dumpster to haul the junk away, but my went crazy with the chainsaw and trimmed the trees in front, filling the dumpster twice. Twice!

Anyway, I stacked all the junk on a corner of the patio, with the best sheets of plywood stacked vertically. Sunday I noticed there were nails pointing into the walkway…very much a hazard. I pulled one out with a hammer, and that one darn nail was supporting something else, and that slipped, and the whole pile of junk cascaded around me like Fibber McGee’s closet! You would have to be in the Navy to hear worse language!

So I’ve decided not to use the plywood anymore…bad memories. Instead, I bought this cool insulating foam from Lowe’s. At least I thought I did.

According to an article I read in Garden Railroader Magazine you can use insulating foam for structures…you have to coat it with something like stucco, but it’s supposed to hold up for decades.

Well, the foam I bought at $10 for a 4×8 sheet of 5/8 looks suspiciously like the foam my laptop came in. What gives? It has a very interesting thin sheet of plastic, kind of like a Mylar, on the faces, but once you cut it you get that grainy, crumbly snowfall of little pieces. Grrrrrr

I used the really sharp knife blade in my-friend-the-Leatherman. Most often it worked when I cut quickly, but the stryofoam bunched up underneath the Mylar sheet and made a mess. Grrrrrrr

To do this right we’ll have to invest in a hot knife, unless I can find a plan to build one on the…you know me…cheap. I’m excited to use it as a building material…just have to get used to its idiosyncrasies.

I’ll do that after I clean up the wreckage on the patio!

It's still styrofoam!

Ten bucks a sheet! Cheap!

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…

We’ve done a lot of track designing in Google SketchUp. Beyond the obvious advantage of being free, the 3D modeling software features a huge suite of tools to help you design structures. My wife and I were looking at plants today (landscaping…Hooray!), and she asked that I firmly identify what I wanted to build where so she would know what to plant.

I thought about it for awhile, and realized that I didn’t really know what I wanted in the China Section of the P-P Ry. I reviewed my DVD of Dreamworks’ Kung Fu Panda (which, if you still haven’t seen it, I just have to tell you you’re missing something special!), and found a PDF of a Chinese Pagoda diorama you could build. Well, that got me thinking, and I turned back to our old friend, Google SkethUp.

You can download the program for free by visiting http://sketchup.google.com. Be prepared to be amazed by what you find there. The breadth of the tools available, and therefore the number of applications for this software, is breathtaking.

So, download it, install it, and check with me when you’re done. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

Ready?

When you first open the software, you get a picture of a guy standing at the nexus of three colored lines. If you click on the guy and press DELETE he won’t bother you any more.

The Red line represents Width, the Green is Height, and the Blue is depth.

Up along the top there you’ll see a variety of tools. The program should start with the Pencil selected. If it doesn’t, select it by clicking on it. Now click on the nexus point, and drag your mouse along the Red line. In the lower right you’ll see the length of the line you’re drawing extend as you move the mouse.

If the dimensions are too large, say it’s drawing in feet when you want to draw in inches, click on the Magnifying Glass in the toolbar at the top of the screen. Pushing up on the drawing zooms you in, while pulling down zooms you out. When you’re zoomed in close enough, click on the pencil and you’re back in business.

Drawing a line begins and ends with a mouse click. Draw your next line at the end of your first, moving the mouse straight up. You’ll see that your line turns green, indicating you’re following the Green axis. Click to finish that line. Now draw a line on the Green axis starting from the other end of your first line. See how SketchUp automatically squares up your corners when you get to the same length as the second line? It makes it very easy to draw a box. When you’ve clicked on the end of your third line, click again and complete the rectangle by going back along the Red axis and connecting the tops of your two Green axis lines.

Your rectangle should automatically fill in.

If it doesn’t, one of your lines doesn’t lie along the Green axis. It’s hard to see in the 2D view. Click on the picture of the earth with arrows around it – the Orbit button. The cool thing about modeling in 3D is that you can move the drawing around however you like, and look at it from multiple sides. When you find your misaligned line, click on the Select Arrow at the upper left of the toolbar. Next, click on your bad line, and it will turn blue. Press DELETE and it will go away so that you can draw the line correctly.

There is an interesting feature called “Push/Pull” that will save you a lot of time. Once you have a filled-in rectangle, click on the Orbit button and tilt the drawing slightly down, so that you have a slight perspective on it. Now click on the orange icon that looks like a rubber stamp, and then click on your rectangle. Your filled in area becomes filled with little dots. Now, slide the mouse along the Blue axis…your rectangle becomes a box!

That’s all there is to basic SketchUp manipulation. There are a gazillion other tools, and you’ll get to ‘em as you progress with your drawing. I included a sketch of a shed I built in my backyard based on a SketchUp design…the real deal turned out pretty darned close.

When I’ve got my Chinese structures designed I’ll share ‘em with you. I also have some plant information that you will definitely want to look at…shall we say tomorrow night?

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!

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!