Poolside Rails

Now, I consider myself a patient man. I don’t mind if Polly Pockets gets wedged in my LGB coaches. I don’t mind removing the occasional dog poo from the railways. I don’t mind moving the flower pots off the track so that I can run the train. I don’t mind those things.  But this, this I mind.

I come home from work and what do I find but downed power lines…not just downed power lines, mind you, because that might be acceptable, but mangled lines and quasi-dug up poles…that I just can’t handle. Why, the paint is scarcely dry on the crummily-painted poles in the first place!

Although we know the attacker is Zorro the Idiot (I used to call him the Idiot,  then changed his name to the Wonder Dog, as in I wonder what he’ll destroy next. Now he’s back to the Idiot),  I don’t believe he acted alone on this caper.

No, let’s take our ultra-cool Ray-Bans off for a moment and analyze the scene CSI-wise. Looking around the Paris Section with a flashlight, the surprise is not what we find, but what we don’t.  The stunning brunette (my wife) looks at me quizzically.

“What’s missing?” she asks, with that raised eyebrow that means she’s thinking I’m an idiot again. She may be right.

“You may have a master’s degree in Russian Literature,” I say, smugly, “but I see no poo up here.”

For effect I swing the beam of the flashlight around the crime scene. There are the downed power lines, all twisted and ruined. There’s the bent power pole, the tipped over trains, the knocked down GI Joe guys. But there is no poo.

“Perhaps he came up here to urinate,” she says, mystified.

Frankly, I love it when she speaks French. But, back to business.  There’s no wet spot. Of course things could have dried up. But I think something else happened.  Someone else is an equal partner in this little tragedy.

I don’t like cats. We have just three of the beasts now, down from a personal high of seven of the urinating, territory-marking, stinking little eating machines. Oh sure, they’re cute when they’re little. All three of our monsters are old people now, easily over a decade.

One of ‘em, Louis by name…that’s Louis, pronounced Loo-wee, as in gooey or pee-you-ee, is a nasty old fellow bequeathed to us by some friends who aren’t any more. Not that they aren’t people any more, but the friendship, strained at its best, has waned away to next to nothingness.

Louis is a nasty old codger, age 14,  who scratches at the bathroom door while I’m shaving in the mornings, preparing to drive the 43 miles to my under-funded job with the Evil Empire. He thinks he scratches at the door, but our former friends had his front paws declawed. Did I mention they were former? Anyway, he makes this pounding noise on the door every blessed morning. Does he want to say good morning? Does he come in to make me feel loved and appreciated? No. He leads me directly to his cat food bowl, which is in a windowsill to keep it away from the Idiot. He likes it when I lift him up there. Yes, your majesty.

Anyway, my firm belief is that King Louis enticed the Idiot to chase him and dashed under the power lines, knowing that Prince Ding-Dong would plunge straight through them. Why? Why would a cat do that?  If you must ask that, you obviously don’t own a cat!

I must seriously rethink this overhead power thing. I really like the look, but obviously so does Louis!

We’ve reached a dangerous pass on the Paris to Peking Railway, a dangerous pass.  I’ve got the cart firmly before the horse, the bull firmly by the tail so that we may face the situation…our bass is significantly ackwards.

Yes, we got the wire…26 gauge solid core wire from Fry’s. I never even thought of Fry’s as having that kind of stuff, but we were there, and, well, it was there, and, well, here we are. Wired.  Five bucks and we’re set up.

It looks okay. Not great. I imagine greatness will come over time, when I figure out how to get the wire to drape nicely and not remember the kinks and bends I induced stringing it between the poles. I know it’s green…I plan to paint it when I get it to drape correctly. Who knew draping wire was such a pain in the hoo-hoo?  Oh, it looks easy enough, and stringing it between the poles is a piece of cake. But getting it hang correctly, that’s a different fish.

You know how that creative fever gets you going? I just wanted to see if the 26 gauge wire was significant enough to carry power to the Christmas light bulbs, that’s it. Just a test.

But I had built those four prototype poles and stuck ‘em out there already. And I did really want to be sure I could transfer power from one side of the track to the other side overhead…that’s a big thrill for me. Well, naturally I had to string the wire over the poles just once, to see what it looked like and be sure that it would work.

My little girl was playing with her Polly Pockets over at the station building in the Ukraine Section and really wanted me to hang around and keep her company…not play, mind you, but keep her company.

I direct connected the 26 gauge wire from the power pack to the leads that supply power to the lights of the station. Lit up like a champ, and it really took all of 15 seconds to do. Okay, we’ll try running the wires over the poles and then connecting ‘em. Because I’d done all the prework with the plastic bead insulators, that process took all of another minute, and everything worked great.

“Daddy, aren’t you going to stay out here?”

That’s when the Idiot…I mean Wonder Dog…no, I mean the Idiot, decided to jump up on the railway and bashed into my wiring. I had rather wanted to see what would happen in that eventuality, just not quite so soon. You can see from the picture that everything is okay, just a big sag in the wires.

Another couple of minutes found that problem sorted out. But how to get power past the big stone column and over to the Ukrainian Station? Getting wiring past that sucker has been an issue since I first saw the railway, and by gum today seemed to be the day to fix it.

Imagine you were high in the mountains, running telegraph wire alongside the railroad. Here, on this bend, is a huge boulder that leaves you no clearance to place a pole. When you’re done cursing the surveyor and railroad engineer that left you such a tight pass, what do you do? The answer is easy: use the boulder instead of using poles!

Out came the Ryobi power drill, the good one, my crummy masonry drill bits, the Simul-Dremel, and the left over dowel pieces, and I got started. I drilled two holes in the mortar between the  stones of the column…well, I started to. I bought these really inexpensive, spelled c-h-e-a-p,  masonry drill bits from Big!Lots some time ago and had never had a chance to use them.  The bit started in the concrete, made maybe a 16th of an inch dimple, and then quit cutting.  I changed my pressure on the drill every way I could think of, but it made no difference. The bit went instantly dull and quit cutting. Fortunately I had bought a masonry screw kit from Lowe’s, and that included a masonry bit. THAT sucker bored a perfect hole in the mortar.

The length of crossbeam in this case didn’t matter much to me, and so I rather eyeballed a length and said “okay”, hacked off a fair piece of ¼” dowel, drilled two little holes for insulators, and shoved it into the hole, having doused the shoved end with Plumber’s Goop.

Here’s the dilemma, the problem, the big deal: look at the fence in the background. It’s bad. It’s really, really bad. I’m going to have to replace that fence. But replacing the fence? That’s some money, there, bucko…some money maybe I don’t have lying around here.

And there’s that whupping big stump there, too. I’m really excited to move on the wiring, but can’t until I deal with those two issues. Maybe I can skip ‘em both until I come up with some sort of funding for such projects, and move forward with the railway in the Parisian Section. But the wiring really got me today…wiring like this is pretty permanent stuff. In order to replace that fence I’d have to step through the wires like Godzilla…Dadzilla!…and the potential for damage is pretty huge.

Drat!

Well, my wife is mad at me because I spent a little too long on the garden railway. I swear, though, it was only because she was working on a project which delayed us from going to Lowe’s to pick up the stuff I needed for the projects I was supposed to be working on. And while I was working on the railway I also opened up and bleached the pool filter…that’s gotta count for something!

So, the Ukrainian Section lights up at night! Two streetlights, one on either end of the station platform, and another light inside the station and one more mysteriously shining from the windows of the farmhouse away down the tracks make the nighttime railway all twinkly and stuff.

Here’s the killer: I didn’t spend a penny. As you’ll recall from previous posts, I stole an idea from Kalmbach’s Tips & Tricks for your garden railway supplement. The idea was to use bulbs and sockets from miniature Christmas light sets as lights for the garden railway. After some trial and error I found some success with them. Kalmbach is right…they work great!

The deal is that miniature Christmas light sets are wired in series – if one burns out the rest go out, too. Modern sets have an additional wire that defeat that problem, but the sets are still wired in series. I was freaked out about that when I started this project. My freaking out increased when I wired just one light bulb directly to the plug of the light set all by itself and plugged it in.

ZZZZZ-POP!

That was the brightest I’ve ever seen one of those miniature light bulbs go…in the half second of its flaming death. It seems that my freaking out was entirely unnecessary. They’re just light sockets and bulbs after all. Two wires, nothing more.

Last week I built that cool streetlight and accidently wired it to the AC terminal of my LGB powerpack (not the DC terminal as previously reported…AC, DC, what’s the diff?). I built another streetlight and tested it on the AC terminal while the first streetlight was working…both worked just fine. Knowing that I could wire two bulbs directly to the AC terminal gave me this wicked idea…what if I had a power distribution system that would provide direct power to all bulbs equally? I think that’s called parallel wiring.

I drove two long wood screws into the underside of the station platform with the intention of using them as terminal posts for the two streetlights. I wrapped the lead wires from the powerpack to the screws, then wired each streetlight to the screws. It worked great…both lamps lit equally when powered by the screw. I tested a third lamp to see if the other two dimmed at all…nosiree Bob, not on my watch. That’s when I got the idea to continue to drive the wood screws through the floor of the station. Doing so tightly holds the wiring underneath the platform…that’s a good thing.

Coolest, though, is that the upper portions of the screws provide equal electrical access to just about anywhere in the Ukrainian Section…farther, in fact. I have a crummy old extension cord from which I cut the head and tail some time ago, expecting to use the wiring for some dopey project. I wired another of the Christmas light bulbs to one end and wrapped the other end around the screws…Dude! Long distance lights!

In theory one could use that extension cord to replicate the screw-terminal dealio in the Ukrainian Station, daisy-chaining lighting systems far into the night.

So, that’s my discovery for the day. Yep, my wife is mad at me…even though I framed in and wallboarded up a wall in my daughter’s closet, it still didn’t outweigh the time on the railway.

This a delicate balancing trick, my friend….delicate! At least I now have lights to see what I’m doing!

Be gone, o Darkness! Stay back, ye night! The wizardry of electrical lights has come to the Ukraine!

Okay, so I have to admit I had two really big surprises on this streetlight project; the first was when I nearly electrocuted myself, the second came when I actually shot the picture above. More on that in a moment.

Just for giggles and grins I decided to try my hand at building streetlights. I had been thinking about the railway and how forlorn the China Section looked after the attack by the rabid idiot. I was really tired, and it was really hot, and I just plain didn’t feel like doing the many, many chores I had to do around here.

The upright, or standard as we say in the lighting biz, is an eight inch long piece of 1/4″x 1/4″ wood I bought at Michael’s some time ago for the combine project, which, by the way, has yet to see the light of day. I made the two inch long arm out of the same wood. I drilled a nice hole through the back of the light post and into the end of the arm and then drove a ½ inch nail in there, gluing the two pieces together with Plumber’s Goop first. Then I laid the thing down and cut a brace out of a coffee stir stick. I applied it with the same combo of ½ inch nail and Plumber’s Goop, making sure to drill pilot holes for the nails and cutting the nails in half so they wouldn’t poke through the other side of the pole. Found that out the hard way on the first nail. Oops.

As you may recall (bless you if you do!), I wrote a post back in early July about cutting up cheapo Christmas light sets to use them on the garden railway. I had a mangled set that I had used for that article still kicking around, and I cut a bulb and socket combo out of it, making sure I had at least ten inches of wire dangling off the end.

Getting the light socket onto the arm proved a little more difficult. I drilled a little hole in the back edge of the socket and matched it with a little hole drilled vertically through the end of the arm, planning to stick a small screw in there. Two problems: no little screw, and what the heck to do with the stiff wires coming out of the back of the socket. It occurred to me to try and stuff one of the wires through the little hole I’d drilled. The wire obviously wouldn’t fit through the hole, so I drilled it out to a larger diameter, and, while I was at it, drilled a second hole just inboard from the first for the other wire. With the wires poked through the two holes the socket snugged nicely up against the end of the arm. Voila!

I grabbed a coil of wire from my garage workshop, planning to make a nice little wrap around the wire and the arm to hold the wire down and make it look nice. It turned out to be 18 gauge wire…sonny, you aint gonna wrap that around a 1/4 x 1/4 square and have it look any good at all!

In messing with the wire I found that I could make a pretty good staple by bending it in a “c” shape around the jaw of my needle nose pliers and whacking it with a hammer. The staple straddles the wire and clamps into the wood…very nice! I did one of those on top of the arm and then ran the wires down the back of the post, stapling them about every inch of the way.

I cut the lampshade from a Safeway Black Cherry soda can, using a Dremel metal-cutting blade as a circle template. I marked the center and cut a ¼ inch hole in it and cut along the radius from there to the outside edge. The shade fit around the bulb but was flat, so I drew one edge of the shade over the other to lend an angle to it. It looked pretty good. I glued it together with Plumber’s Goop, but cut just the tiniest tab in the overlapping section and folded it over to keep the glued pieces from shifting.

Well, it looked like heck. Blonde wood, white wires held down with silver staples, and pictures of cherries on the lampshade! A quick blast from the Rust-Oleum brown can and, voila, a streetlight!

“Are you sure you want to do that?” my older daughter asked, watching me wire the streetlight into the mangled Christmas light set.

“It’ll be fine…I know what I’m doing.” Poor daddy, dumb as a doorknob.

My mother-in-law and wife were in the kitchen when I plugged it in.

ZZZZZZZZZ-PAP!

I jerked the plug out the wall, watching the blue spark follow the plug! The bulb was all silver inside. My wife giggled while my mother-in-law stared at me in horror. Maybe that light set has just a little too much manglement in it after all!

A big screw holds the streetlight, with its new bulb, firmly to the station platform. Two smaller holes allow the wires to drop through the platform without fuss. I wired the light to the AC side of the LGB transformer because I wasn’t sure how it would work on the DC side. I gently turned the power up. It worked just fine.

My wife and I took our younger daughter down to the Griffith Park Observatory this afternoon. Although an excellent place, it was hotter than a two dollar pistol, and it was dark by the time we got home. I rushed outside to snap the picture above, but had put the transformer away. Fumbling in the dark with a flashlight and recalcitrant wires, I was certain I wired the streetlight to the AC side. I was quite surprised to see the light wink on when I plugged the transformer in! I looked at the transformer – I had wired the light to the DC side. You can see the nice amber glow in the picture above.

So, what did I learn? Cheapo Christmas light sets are a great source for light sockets and bulbs and wiring, but shouldn’t be used as the source for power. You can wire ‘em right to the DC terminal and not worry about a thing. I imagine one could wire a bunch of them in parallel and be just fine – again, that nice amber glow is great!

Darkness be gone! Streetlight(s) have finally come to the Paris to Peking Railway! Huzzah!

On Sunday we discussed using inexpensive miniature Christmas lights to illuminate the structures in the China Section of the Garden Railway. Well, I tested the theories with some success.

Miniature Christmas light sets come in sets of either 35 or 50, 100, 150 and up. You’ll find that if you remove one bulb from a larger light set, say 70 lights or more, some of the lights go out, but some stay on. This is because those larger sets are in fact multiple smaller sets (the 150 light set is actually three 50 light sets wired in parallel). The bulbs in one set go out, but the other two attached sets stay lit. For our purposes (inexpensive) the smaller the set the better. Sure, you’ll find that a 150 light set costs only twice as much as a 50 light set, but the wiring is much more complicated.

Our goal was to edit out some lights in order to light our outdoor railroad buildings realistically. It simply wouldn’t do to cram 35 lights into a single building…talk about your blazing lights!
So, I tried it.

Now, you know that I’m not an electrician. But as I said at the outset of this series, the Garden Railway demands an ever expanding knowledge of a variety of disciplines. Now I’m an electrician.

Editing a small light set is quite easy. There are two wires associated with each light socket; one goes in, one comes out. Cut both wires off of the socket. Strip the wires and then join them back together. For the sake of demonstration I used wire nuts to connect the two wires together. When the real thing comes around I’ll use solder. That’s it. You have edited out a socket.

You can also extend the length between lights by inserting a length of wire in the middle of your edits. So, you ask, why would you want to extend the distance between the lights in a set? Read on!

VERY IMPORTANT INFORMATION
The lights in a miniature light set are wired in series, not parallel. The difference is that each light in a parallel set is connected directly to the main electrical supply, while each bulb in a series set gets its power from the light before it. Each bulb in a parallel set gets 120 volts, whereas the 120 volts coming from the wall is parsed between each bulb in a series set. Since each bulb in a parallel set is independently powered, it continues to light even after every other bulb burns out. But each bulb in a series set is interdependent: if one goes out, they all go out. Newer light sets have special bulbs that keeps that from happening, but that’s in the bulb, and has nothing to do with the wiring.

Here’s what makes the wiring system important: say your miniature bulb is rated at 2.5 volts – that’s what it draws when lit. You’ve got 50 of those guys lined up in a set…let’s see, 2.5 times 50 comes out to…hmm, carry the one…look at that, your set will withstand 125 volts. What’s coming out of your electrical socket? Why, 120 volts! It’s a match. Because they’re wired in series, each lamp only gets 1/50th of 120 volts, which is just under the 2.5 volt limit on the lamp. But, should you cut out, say, 25 of those lights, well, each lamp gets 4.8 volts. Each one will burn super bright for awhile, and then burn out.

Mr. Wizard, here, wondered why I couldn’t just make my own light set, and wired ONE socket up directly to the plug. If light bulbs had voices I think you would have heard my little 2.5 volt guy scream bloody murder when I plugged him in and gave him 50 times his electrical limit. There was a loud crack, and a pop, and my little bulb quickly, quickly died. Requiescat in pace. Now I have to give back my wizard hat.

So, remember that each bulb is designed to take just 2.5 volts. They can take more juice, but each more percent of voltage they take shortens their lifespan by a similar percentage. My 50 to 1 experiment shortened my bulb’s life down to about 1/10th of a second!

Can you safely edit lights out of a Christmas light set? Absolutely. Does it reduce the lifespan of the bulbs? You better believe it. Be ready to replace bulbs frequently.

I think a better solution will be to extend the distance between the lights in the set. What if the same $1 Miniature Christmas Light Set was spliced between the bulbs to give them more distance…custom spliced, say, so that one bulb could be three feet away…could be used to light every building in my China Section?

Hey! I just lit all of the buildings and street lights in my layout for a buck and some wire! The wheels are turnin’, I tell you!