Poolside Rails

Warped Boards!

As you well know, there’s an adage that says it never rains in Southern California. There’s another one that says an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. There still one more that says stupid is as stupid does.

Well,  you probably know we Californians are dying for rain…after all these years of drought, we’re down to putting on galoshes and pulling out the bumbershoots when we see a cloud! So we were delighted to welcome this most recent deluge last week!  Even though it wreaked havoc on the house…it’s been a long, dry year…it was wonderful to have water fall from teh sky so early in the fall!

The roof leaked over my son’s room, and he’ll soon be the happy recipient of new drywall and flooring when I discover where the water got in. It also leaked here in my office…ol’ Bessie the computer almost got drenched. Almost.

Things weren’t so happy outside. Oh, the track held up – brass rails on plastic ties don’t care much about water.  The Forces of Valor Farmhouse held up just fine. The Pola railroad station building got wet but is now dry. That’s the good news.

It’s that deck – my beautiful hand-laid coffee-stir-stick masterpiece that took the damage.  Makes me, a grown man, father of three, want to cry.

It's Ruined!

What is particularly distressing about this tragedy is that I took the precaution of bathing, and I do mean bathing, the deck in waterproofing juice before I stained it. As you’ll recall, I actually was concerned that the waterproofing would repel the stain!  That was my ounce of prevention.

But, in thinking about it, I seem to recall my wife watching me splash on the skim-milky looking waterproofing stuff…Thompson’s Water Seal, I think. She watched for a while as I slathered it on.

“Don’t you think that’s rather thin?” she asked with arched eyebrow.

Now, it’s a guy thing, I know it, but I was three quarters of the way through with the project. You’re a guy…you would have said the same thing:

“Nope, it’s fine.”

“I think you’re supposed to mix it up, like paint,” she said before she left.  She has her Master’s Degree in Russian literature…she knows BS when she sees it.

“Nope, it’s fine,” I replied.

The can of water seal was stored outside, see, for, like, a long time. The lid had rusted onto the can. I had to use a pair of vise-grips to get it open, and you can just imagine what those vise-grips did to the thin steel cap of the water seal can. Mangle city! Now, this is one of those gallon sized rectangular steel cans with the easy-pour spout and a handle and everything.  Because the pour spout is only two inches wide, you can’t get a stir stick down in there to shake things up. Because I’d screwed up the screw top to the can, it won’t go back on, making shaking the can itself a very messy proposition.

I knew the stuff wasn’t right, but I’m an optimist in addition to being a somewhat dim bulb. I figured there was probably some degree of water protection in the milky effluvia in which I bathed the platform. And then I stained it with something that said it had a varnish in it. That should have worked, shouldn’t it?

Well, it didn’t.

It seems to me it took just about forever to cut down all those coffee-stir sticks and glue ‘em down and sand the crackers out of ‘em.  Looking in my account of free time to rework something on which I’ve already spent a gajillion hours, I find there are precious few minutes there. Hmph.

Oh, sure...the bad roof's just fine!

To add insult to injury, take a look at the roof on the Forces of Valor Farmhouse. Do you see how the rows of shingles form columns, too? Now go take a look at any shingle roof…hey, those rows are offset from one another! When I was done shticking those shingles down I nailed the roof with a quick coat of Rust-Oleum brown. That’s when I spotted the mistake.

I’d be willing to redo that roof because of the error, but of course that roof held the water out just fine!

So my pride and joy, the one piece of woodworking I’ve ever done in my life that actually looks half decent is wiped out.

My favorite battle in World War II is Midway. I’ve always been fascinated by the intricate timing and the seemingly unbelievable coincidences that led to the American victory. I often think about what happened over in the planning room of the Japanese high command when they found out that four of their six carriers, the very backbone of their strategy for the entire war,  were now gone.  I’ve often wondered what it’s like to find your resources suddenly swept off the board.  Now, there’s no way to equate the damage done to my little platform with the incredible sacrifices of both fleets at Midway, and this is an improper reflection. Please disregard.

So, it’s back to the drawing board. What do you think of this? Scrape off the stir sticks and replace ‘em with unwarpy ones, and then spray the crackers out of ‘em with Rust-Oleum brown, and then sand away the tops to accept a stain and a coat of varnish? In theory the paint would provide a nice water seal all the way around the boards, and the varnish over the stain would protect the tops and make ‘em look purty. The seams would looked caulked between the boards, too!

So what lesson did we learn?  Well, it doesn’t rain on your HO layout in the basement, does it? You can make roofs out of toilet paper and they’ll last a decade!

But out here in the yard we must never, never forget: Garden railroading is REAL railroading!

Europeanification. It’s a word. Go ahead, look it up. I’ll wait. It’s not? You, my friend, must have a cheap dictionary!

As you know, the Bachmann Big Hauler 4-6-0 is now a Bachmann Not-So-Big Hauler 4-4-0. It’s lost its glitzy green hue, instead wearing a coat of dowdy brown Rust-Oleum. I think it’s pretty cool looking, myself. Kind of tough and industrial but charming at the same time. My plan had been to paint it black, but the brown Rust-Oleum was all I had in the garage.

My brother is a graphic artist, and a wizard at Photoshop. He emailed me a picture of my own locomotive in black paint! And it looks pretty cool – much more macho!

But the Paris to Peking Railway travels from, get this, Paris to Peking. I just can’t see some Parisian firm buying an American locomotive when their own are so abundant. No matter how I paint the Bachmann Not-So-Big Hauler it’s still going to have an American outline. Unless, of course, I follow the clues given by my brother, and paint the thing in MS Paint!

I leafed through a bunch of Model Railroader magazines and a book on my shelf called Encyclopedia of Trains. It’s a book filled with all kinds of drawings and photographs of locomotives. Like you, I picture long strings of box cars or passenger coaches when I think of trains, not just a locomotive. The book is clearly titled to sell to people who plan to give it as a gift and don’t know a fiddler’s fart about trains!

Anyway, I tried to find common European attributes to locomotives built prior to 1910 that I could model with my limited brain power and modeling skills. Round windows on the cab seemed to be pretty popular, as did saddle tanks. The Europeans tended to put the headlight down low, just in front of the boiler. And they used that interesting buffer system.

I opened my picture of the 4-4-0 in a program by Serif called Photo Plus. It’s available as a free trial download from Serif.com, and is a really powerful picture editor. I take my pictures most often with my Blackberry Curve, although the detail shots come from my old Sony Handycam that I dropped in my swimming pool. Yes, yes I did. I caught if before it hit the bottom, but I don’t think it was designed as an underwater camera. It took two weeks to dry out, and doesn’t like to shoot video anymore, and the auto exposure board took a hit, but the lenses are fine, and if you’re careful with it, it still shoots great pictures! I use it to make videos, only shooting them in studio, and the Handycam is Firewired to my computer. As the computer does all the recording, the camera just acts as a lensing unit. Am I off topic?

Between Serif and MS Paint I conjured up the picture you see above. I figure I can close up the cab’s existing windows with sheet plastic and then carve new, round ones. The cowcatcher is held on by two screws. That bar in the front that holds the buffers – I can make that out of laminated craft sticks, or, gasp, a single piece of wood.

Those tanks, however, are causing a bit of consternation. I could make them out of sheet styrene, but they will take a lot of handling, as that’s the primary pick-up-the-locomotive spot. Wood? Polished and lacquered wood might hold that shape. It would be heavier than empty plastic, too.

Why go through this Europeanification process? Why not stick with the LGB 0-4-0. Well, the LGB will remain on the roster, for sure, as will the New Bright 2-6-0, if only for comic relief. But I’m just dying to see if an ultra-heavy locomotive (six, count ‘em SIX D-cell batteries in the boiler) can tame the wild rails of the China Section. If it can, and I’m thinking it will, it will open the ENTIRE China Section to rail travel once more. If that happens, this is the first of a long line of battery-powered pieces that look European, effectively eliminating the tyranny of AC power.

My little black canine idiot has, of course, completely buried the China Loop again, so I’ll have to dig THAT out before I can test this guy out. Still, I believe this is progress…

Yes, today is the day. You, my lucky friend, are looking at Article Number 50 on the Paris to Peking Railway project. The Board of Directors is very proud, cigars and brandy all around.

“Capital,” says the CEO, “simply capital!”

“Outstanding achievement!” roars the PR Guy. “It’s a record!”

“It’s a bleedin’ miracle,” mumbles the Chief Engineer who may have had a few too many of those free brandies.

My brother created both the Paris to Peking Railway Logo and their new slogan: Paris to Peking Railway, from P to Shining P!

So, what have we accomplished in our fifty articles? We’ve chronicled the design of the garden railway, the clearing and repair of the tracks in the China Section, the opening of the Main Line, the Wyatt Exposition Day extravaganza, and a host of other things. If you haven’t looked before, I encourage you to take a moment and click on some of the articles we’ve published on the railway.

What’s next? For starters, I can promise you you’ll see at least another fifty articles! There’s a lot of work to be done before we can call this railway operational (particularly as it isn’t!). And once we’ve got it running there is so much detail work to be done I doubt we’ll be out of articles at 500! Thank you for following along, and keep visiting: great things are happening soon!

One of the great things that happened this weekend was I figured out how to put a roof on my decrepit farmhouse! I thought this was particularly brilliant: I created shingles out of the ends of craft sticks. Please, hold your applause until the end.

Cutting the ends off of the craft sticks turned out to be the most difficult part of the project. I needed about 180 shingles, which equates to…let’s see, carry the one, no, wait, borrow the one, oops, where’s the pencil, uh huh, no, 3’s not right, let’s see…90 craft sticks if I used both ends of each stick. I decided to use craft sticks instead of coffee stir sticks or popsicle sticks for just one reason: I’m lazy. I would have had to place double the number of popsicle sticks, and triple the number of coffee stir sticks! Skip that noise! Instead I masking-taped together a huge stack of 90 craft sticks, binding it firmly against squirming. The masking tape also marked the cut line I was going to use to remove the ends.

I started cutting with my homemade hacksaw, but that was too darned slow. I tried the keyhole saw. That was too sloppy. I tried the steel cutting blade in my knock-off Dremel tool. Now you’re talking! It was slow, smoky and noisy, but it worked!

I cut a 6x11 piece of ½ inch plywood for the roof itself. The Amazing Plumber’s Goop did an excellent job of holding the 180 shingles onto the plywood. I started at the left side of the roof and worked it up and down. Then I completed the bottom row, so as to give myself guidelines for sticking on the rest of the shingles. At first I was applying the glue to the back of each shingle and sticking it down. But I’ve removed the cover from my patio, and the glue renders a smell too heady for those inside the house, and, well it’s August, and even though this is Ventura, which I swear is so foggy that Londoners actually complain about our fog, but today it was hot and sunny and I spent all day yesterday hiking in the mountains where the hot August sun is really hot, and I was hot, and everything was hot, and I was sitting in the sun because I’d removed our patio cover, and, well, I just wanted to get the job done. So I smeared the adhesive, which is both waterproof and quick-setting, onto the tops of the in-place shingles and the roof surface above them en masse, so as to speed up the shingling process. Although it worked, I wasn’t as happy with the stick-down of those shingles as I was with the individually applied ones.

Lesson learned? Don’t rush, don’t take shortcuts, and go buy an umbrella!

When I had finished it, I liked the effect, but something was wrong…it doesn’t look quite right. As I was working on it I kept thinking that rain would fall between the columns of shingles and soak right in. It wasn’t until I finished that I realized that in the real world each row of shingles is staggered from the one below it. I made my rows straight. Rats!

There. Now you know my dirty little secret. When you shingle your roof, in any scale, 1/1 or smaller, stagger the rows!

The cigars are all smoked down to stubs, and the Board Members are getting restless. The Chief Engineer spills his brandy on the CEO’s shoes, and things are getting rather tense.

“On to Paris!” I yell, and everyone sloppily raises their brandy snifters.

“From P to Shining P!” they roar in response.

The meeting is adjourned, and the room quickly clears. All that’s left now is the cigar smoke and empty glasses. I glance in the big mirror that hangs on one end of the room.

“Fifty articles,” I say to myself. “That IS a milestone!”

You know my rule: measure once, cut twice. It’s not a good rule, but it is one to which I unfortunately subscribe.

I’m an artist. I’d love to sit here and tell you I’m a craftsman, but I’m not. I’m an artist. I like to jump into a project and trust my artistic instinct to get me out. It most often works.

The Ukraine Train Station, however, has proven to be quite the different kettle of fish. Here’s a new set of rules that will save your goose when you attempt a project like this:
1. Don’t Mark the Ruler: I have this nasty habit of marking the ruler with my pencil rather than writing down the precise measurement. When I move to the piece I’m cutting, I simply look for my mark on the ruler. But that depends upon your place the ruler on your stock in exactly the same manner you placed in on the piece you measured. On a good day that’s extremely imprecise. Take your time and write down the measurement…don’t trust that you’ll remember it, WRITE IT DOWN!

2. Use Millimeters Whenever Possible: I embarrassed myself on this project by repeating to myself over and over “Six and three quarters and that little thingy”, meaning the 1/8th mark. My daughter overheard me and asked me what I was talking about. Two mistakes: I didn’t take the time to write it down, and I didn’t use the metric system, because 57mm is easier to remember than six and three quarters and that little thingy. Plus, when it comes time to do mathematic equations, divinding millimeters is infinitely easier than dividing fractions!

3. Learn Your Power Tools: I make digital movies. Rule number one there is to learn your camera’s idiosyncrasies so that you can compensate for them. When I broke out my Hitachi Power Saw to cut the station in half, I didn’t exactly know WHICH line gauge actually matched the blade. As a result, the north wall of the station is slightly longer than the south wall, so that when I go to attach a back wall, it will sit at an angle relative to the front wall. Not to scale, and not cool.

4. Most Important: T H I N K!!! The rest of this article is on the result of rushing and not thinking, so I’ll simplify the rule here: Plan ahead, idiot.

When the time came to cut the piece of plywood for the base of the station, I chose a piece from a stack of junk plywood to which I happen to have easy access (I tore the crummy cover off my patio, which left me with a large, unwieldy stack of crummy plywood. I’m working on creative ways to get rid of it).

Anyway, I knew it needed to be 42 inches long, eleven inches wide at one end and twelve at the other. I was in a hurry to get the station set up, and I didn’t care much about the plywood piece or how carefully I cut it. I got my 18 inch ruler out and quickly measured off the dimensions.

Then I whupped out my Hitachi and quickly carved through the plywood. There was a place, along the long leg that was to face the track, that had a knot right there along the cut line, and it bumped the saw out of line. I roughly re-cut along the line, but it wasn’t a straight line.
I got the station attached to it, and it looked pretty good. I planked it, and simply planked over the jangly front edge. It looks great from the top.

But yesterday I realized I need to plank the front edge of the platform, too. The back side of the platform rests on a cement wall, and the front edge rests on the roadbed, which is, unfortunately, an inch lower than the wall. I added a one inch strip to the bottom of the platform to keep things level. But the bare edge of the plywood, along with the bare wood of the strip, just didn’t look right.

Planking that front edge required me to reduce/eliminate the nasty hump I left when I cut the plywood the first time. If I had dealt with it when I had the Hitachi on it there would not have been a problem, but I rushed it.

Now, because the top was planked, there was no chance to use the Hitachi without tearing everything up. I tried sanding the hump, but that was slow and terribly ineffective. I eventually put a grinder bit in my knockoff Dremel tool and ground it out. It took about an hour to correct a mistake that, if I’d done it right the first time, would have taken three minutes to fix.

The front edge of my platform is a little wiggly…I think the work crew that built it simply had too much potato vodka the night before, as it looks straight to them…thanks to my work with the knockoff Dremel tool, but looks far better than the ridiculously rough outcropping I’d left with my first cut.

The lesson? You can be creative and artistic, and SMART, if you plan ahead and envision the next step to the one you’re doing. Spontaneity has its place, but not in the scale engineering world!

There’s an old story about the farmer who goes to change the oil in his tractor, but finds that the latch is broken on the barn door. He sets his coffee cup on the work bench and reaches for the screwdriver to fix the latch but knocks over the tin can full of screws. While he’s down there on the floor picking up the screws he finds the nut that popped off the lawnmower handle. He goes to get a wrench to replace the nut but discovers that his wrenches are all mixed up, metric and SAE, and sorts them out. He gets the nut back on the lawnmower handle but sees that there’s a hole in the chicken wire fence. He searches for and finds the baling wire to fix the fence but can’t find his leather gloves. Remembering that he left them outside the chicken coop because he got interrupted in repairing that hole in the roof he goes to find the plywood to finish that job. That’s when his wife calls him for dinner. At the end of the day, the tractor’s oil is unchanged and he can’t remember where he left his coffee cup.

That’s how working on this railroad is. You could make the argument that, if Garden Railroading is Real Railroading, annoyances that intrude on real life would likewise intrude on the rail life, and, by gum, they do!

As you’ll recall, Wyatt was supposed to show up on Sunday, but it turns out I misunderstood the plans and he’s showing up this Thursday. I “shirt-sleeve” engineered a cool pair of station buildings to dress up the railway and draw his attention away from the fact that the railway isn’t fully functional as promised. “If you can’t blind ‘em with your brilliance…” I parked the two half-buildings (cut from a single LGB/Pola railway station) on a sheet of plywood. But the plywood is ugly, out of scale, and just plain rife with splinters for Wyatt’s four-year-old fingers. Okay, so I figured I’d use simple popsicle sticks to plank it. But I ran out of trimmed popsicle sticks yesterday. Man, this thing just keeps getting farther and farther afield!

The nice thing about using popsicle sticks is that they are cheap and scale in appearance. The bad thing is that they have rounded ends, which means you’ll have to trim them in order to plank with them. They’re only six mm wide, and lightly waxed, and slippery as the devil. I did some simple math and figured I’d need just under 200 of them to complete the station platform. I’d already installed 82 of them, so I needed another 120. A hundred and twenty coffee stir-sticks? Oh my.

I found it easier to cut that rounded end off of them en masse, rather than one at a time. You can do it single-fashion-wise with a pair of wire cutters, but your consistency goes way, way down. Instead, I chose to stack up a bunch of them and cut them with my knock-off Dremel tool. However, stacking waxed 6mm sticks is easier than it sounds. Remember Mork & Mindy? There was an old lady who called Mindy’s father a “BB stacker”. You’ll feel just like him when you try to stack up these 6mm sticks.

I invented this interesting jig to help with the task. I call it the Ukrainian Stick Stacker, because the station will be, uh stationed, in my Ukrainian Section. You can see the structure in the picture; a back leg, a wide board with a shelf that sits at an angle against the leg, and a weight to hold down the sticks. Simple to build, it performed remarkably well. I taped a piece of masking tape sticky side up to the bottom stick on the stack. Then, once I’d stacked up my 120 pieces I compressed them and packaged them with the tape. No, I didn’t count them as I went; it turns out that each stick is five sticks wide. Once I’d gotten them compressed and taped I simply turned a pair of sticks on their sides and counted by fives up the stack. I hit the right number quite by luck!

Well, most of the station platform is planked with these little fellas, absolutely glued down with a healthy dose of Amazing E-6000 Industrial Strength adhesive. The half I’d done last night was rock hard this morning, so I am not fearful that today’s work won’t form a good, solid bond.

I hope the bond is strong enough to withstand what comes next: a bath in Thompson’s Water Seal. As the railway is out there in the elements, you’ve got to, got to, got to protect the wood from all those things that damage wood.

Tomorrow I’ll finish the last of the planking, and Thursday I’ll seal the crackers out of it. AFTER young Mr. Wyatt shows up, of course!

You saw that bundle of popsicle sticks I put together yesterday! It was huge! But it wasn’t enough.

The platform on the Ukraine station is far larger than I had anticipated, and will take many more wee little coffee stir-sticks than I had thought!

The project, as you’ll recall, is a continuation of the Distract Wyatt From the Short Running Train Subterfuge I concocted the other day. As the LGB 0-4-0 doesn’t go very far thanks to the condition of the turnout wiring, I decided to dazzle him with a very cool railroad station: my old LGB/Pola building hacked in half. The project has been made doubly difficult by the arrival of Polly Pockets, sponsored by my seven-year-old daughter, and all her assorted pieces of furniture. While it’s a delight to share this project with her (my daughter, not Polly Pockets), I can’t move any part of the structure without a tumbledown of small parts and a pained “Daaaaaadddy!”

The current part of the project is to conceal the hideous nature of the plywood base of the building by planking it over with coffee stir-sticks. I planned to cut the rounded ends off of what I thought was an appropriate number of sticks using a cool invention I read about in Tips and Tricks for Your Garden Railway I (it’s a booklet put out by Kalmbach Publishing that comes with your subscription to Garden Railways Magazine):

You take your super cheap hacksaw blade, glue a couple of pieces of thin scrap wood (I used craft sticks) over either side of one half of the blade, then wrap the sticks in masking tape. The result is a terribly inexpensive, very versatile hacksaw. When the blade goes dull, or when you, like me, push it too hard and break the blade, it’s a painless toss-out of the old one and three minutes until you’ve made a replacement…that’s pretty cool! Plus, as the old blade is steel and it’s encased in a wood and paper handle, it’s a biodegradable toss-out, too!

Actually, though, it didn’t work this time: too slow. I screwed a cutting blade into my fake Dremel tool and tried that. Although noisy, dusty, and still slow, it did the job. I had exactly half the number of five inch sticks that I needed!

The installation of my mini-planks down the length of the platform was time consuming but surprisingly rewarding. I left the station buildings on the platform for the first row of planks (to my daughter’s dismay) to ensure that they neither interfered with the building’s placement nor left a nasty gap at the edge. Nothing makes a model building look more fake than a big gap between it and the ground…how many real houses have you seen with a big crack at the edge of the grass!

For the first row of planking, I spread a thick coat of Amazing E-6000 Industrial Strength adhesive on the underside of the planks and stuck ‘em down, one at a time. I pressed each plank down firmly for 45 seconds to give the glue some time to hold it. I found that it holds better if you give it fifteen or so seconds to cure before you stick the plank on. The Amazing E-6000, made by Eclectic Products, Inc, truly is amazing stuff. It dries waterproof (since it’s made with perchloroethylene), and sets up very fast. After that first row, I found it easier to smear the adhesive to the plywood instead.

My older daughter watched the process for a little bit.

“You realize, of course, that you could do three planks at a time,” she said.

Well, I hadn’t, but couldn’t admit that, and so replied “I was thinking the same thing…”
The work went faster after that. Ahem.

To my younger daughter’s delight (or should I say to Polly Pocket’s delight?) I was able to remove the station building from the platform while I continued with the planking. She was then able to move her ten gazillion little plastic pieces into the buildings.

A couple of my planks were warped, and wanted to sit down on the deck like rocking chair rails. I tapped a ½-inch nail into each end and they snuggled right down. As I had feared, however, the cheap wood split under the first nail. I drilled pilot holes, and all was well. My original plan called for nailing each plank, but the nail head is too large…about the size of a scale fifty cent piece…to look right. I’ll rely on the glue.

Once we’ve got the proper number of planks and they’re all glued down, I’ll bathe the entire structure in Thompson’s Water Seal to protect it from the elements.

I didn’t really pitch my book today, it just sounded better than what I actually did with it which is to register it with the Writer’s Guild of America, West, down in Los Angeles. It took an hour and a half drive to perform a three minute function. But now it’s done, and soon you’ll see my book at your local bookstore. Maybe!

Wyatt is coming on Thursday…three days to prep the rails and finish the station platform. AHHHH! The PRESSURE!!!

What happens when you clean up the railway for the exhibition day, you make the lemonade, pour the chips, scrub those tracks until they shine , WD40 all your rolling stock axles, and sweep your track bed so that there isn’t the possibility of the hint of a misplaced grain of sand? Of course, your guest of honor is a no-show.

Turns out Mr. Wyatt was on vacation last week, I’m assuming it was with his family as he’s only four years old, and is making his return trip today. We’ve been watching his dog while he’s been gone, and I distinctly remember his mother saying “we’ll see you Sunday” as they drove off, the little yapper living up to her reputation…the dog, not the mother.

In part I’m disappointed, as I’ve made the lemonade and poured the chips. In truth, the railway looks better than it has at any time in the last ten years, and it almost works. That’s a bonus, isn’t it? So, the day isn’t a loss.

In addition, I had to make some rather robust decisions on the rush to Wyatt Day – decisions that determine the direction and structure of the railway for many moons to come. That’s a good thing, because I tend to procrastinate…actually, I’ve been putting off procrastination for a while!

So, life goes on. Wyatt and his mom will be around tomorrow to pick up the yapper, but I won’t be here, as I’ll be in Los Angeles hawking my novel. But as he wanders the quiet wonderland of a railway without an engineer, I’m hoping Wyatt’s imagination will do the work of the railway for him. Possibly better than running trains could!

Deciding not to let the day go to waste, I opted to work on the LGB/Pola station again. My seven year old daughter has “decorated” the two structures, agreeing to finally let me turn the buildings back to their proper alignment so that the trains can run. Once you cut the building in half down the roof ridgeline, you get two equal sized buildings with no back wall…a natural beacon for young kids to come and “decorate” with their action figures. My little girl was delighted!

I mounted the structures on pins stuck through a plywood base, which forms the foundation for a station platform. But it’s plywood, which looks like, well, plywood. The kindest thing you can say about it is that it’s grossly out of scale.

Enter popsicle sticks, the wonder building material. I used coffee stir sticks, as they work up to a nice looking planking surface for the platform. Stacking them on a piece of masking tape stretched out on my workbench, I built a hefty brick of them.

The brick is taped firmly together so that I can cut the rounded ends off of all of the sticks at once. It’s much easier to cut a solid unit like that than trying to hold a stack by hand. And cutting them one at a time? Forget it!

Tomorrow, once I’ve finished hawking my book, I’ll get down to hacking the heck out of them. My plan is to glue and nail the sticks to the plywood. These guys are pretty flimsy, and I worry about their ability to fight warping. I’ll smear Plumber’s GOOP, which is strong, clear, and waterproof, on the stick, position it on the plywood base, then drive a ½ inch spike through either end. I may drill a pilot hole first, as these sticks tend to split.

It’s a funny thing about cheap materials: they cost you very little in cash, but suck up that other precious resource, time, in working with them. It’s a trade-off, there’s no doubt. But when the dimes are few and far between, and time is the only commodity on hand, you do what you can. That’s the reality of my situation, and, well, Garden Railroading is Real Railroading!

Just for the record, I did say that the popsicle stick/craft stick retaining wall was temporary, correct? Correct! I had, upon its installation, anticipated a quick and thorough landscaping of the China Section mountain. I expected the retaining wall to remain a week perhaps, certainly no more.

Sir Topham Hat would be angry with me, I’m afraid. “You are causing confusion and delay!”

The landscaping is not done. It’s been three weeks since the addition of the retaining wall, and the landscaping crew has yet to lift a finger. I don’t mind saying it’s a little frustrating.

So, I decided it’s time to reconsider that flimsy wall. I really like the look of it, very scale. But it failed to withstand the almost daily assaults of the barking hole diggers. There have been several disastrous breakthroughs, causing some rather horrendous train wrecks.

Here’s the funny story for the day: I took out my trusty digital camera to document the condition of the existing fence and show the installation of the new one. I had Harry Hardworker pose in front of the old fence.

No sooner did I have Harry in place than our newest canine addition, young Zorro, burst over the mountain, scattering dirt absolutely everywhere! Zorro actually kicked the camera just a half second after I got my shot, and I quickly fired again to capture the event! Stupid dog!

The new wall is a trifle more robust, being made up of actual log sections. Now, again, I point out that this is temporary! Eventually, and I mean that in the “within the next month or so” sort of way, I’ll have plants across the top of the mountain and the logs will be no more.

You don’t want to use untreated or raw wood along the garden railway if you can avoid it. As Garden Railroading is Real Railroading, the rot and insects that attack wood in the real world won’t recognize that your real wood is to scale. Hey! I spent three hours carving that! So you have to make absolutely sure you treat your wood with as tough a solution as you can get. I soaked my craft sticks in Thompson’s Water Seal before I installed them, and after three weeks in the ground they still look as good as new.

All that being said, I didn’t treat the logs with anything. You see, I truly believe that the landscaping will be installed within the next two months, and I know the logs won’t rot in that brief amount of time. And, when the plants go in, the logs come out! Hernan Cortez burned his ships so that he would have to conquer the new world…I will have to replace these logs pretty soon!

I’m looking very forward to running the LGB 0-4-0 through the China Section (as far as it gets, anyway) as soon as the new logs are completely installed. It’s odd to travel the tracks with a brush and garden scoop to pull out the loose dirt and, well, the uh, excrement, before running the trains…I never had to do that in the basement!

The other thing about running these rails: I live three miles from the ocean, and it’s foggy almost every night during the spring and early summer. I’m getting used to polishing the rails with a sharpening stone before powering up.

Man! I really liked that battery locomotive…

Looking at these pictures, I know you think I’ve lost my mind. I can’t say as I blame you. This pictures don’t tell a very good story, do they?

As you recall from yesterday’s episode, my New Bright 2-6-0 had trouble making it through the China Section. Part of it was because the rails are out of gauge. But more trouble came from the fact that copious amounts of dirt had been kicked onto the track by my canine friends.

Here’s the problem: until my China Section Mountain is planted, my southern section is subject to frequent landslides. Here in California landslides are frequently triggered by earthquakes that occur along our many fault lines. On my railroad, the landslides are the dogs’ fault.

I was working on another project this morning here in my shop and spotted my popsicle stick collection (not that I collect them, but I do have quite a pile of them). Hey, I thought, those look like fence slats. Well you know how one idea stacks on top of another and another and before you know it you have a plan.

I had a small collection of ¼ x ¼ square dowels…can you have square dowels?…that looked just the right size for fence posts. I say “had” because I used ‘em all up on this project. With those dowels for posts and popsicle sticks for slats, what could be easier?

As you know, the original builder laid down a six inch wide concrete roadbed. My plan was to drive the fence posts into the mountain at the edge of the roadway. I cut the posts to six inches in length, planning to sink an inch into the ground.

Using my trusty bench vise and a keyhole saw, I stacked the craft sticks up 22 at a time and sawed the rounded ends off of them. Then I soaked everything in Thompson’s Water Seal and let it dry before using it.

Here’s the thing: there are no fasteners of any kind on that fence. Firstly because this is a temporary fence that will most likely be removed once the landscaping is in place. Secondly because gluing the thing in place, or worse, pinning it with scale nails, would be quite difficult. The road curves, which to my limited thinking means the construction would have to take place in situ rather than on the workbench. Well, that rules out epoxy because the set time is too short. AND that rules out GOOP because there is too much dirt present…have you ever used GOOP and gotten dirt in it? And that rules out scale nails because there’s no support to back your tap-tapping with the hammer. Finally, and this is the worst reason of all, but here it is: the dirt seems to hold it just fine! The goal of the fence is to get the dirt off the rails and provide some degree of protection from the passing paws of colossal canines. I think it works just fine for that.

So, there it is, a temporary Not So Great Wall of China. It works great for the moment! Tomorrow is Saturday, and I might luck out and get my landscaping installed. But what will become of the fence? Only time will tell…

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…