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!

For Halloween this year we bought a couple of cheapo plastic skeletons from Big!Lots…our plan was to set ‘em up in front yard like they were having tea (we have a seven year old little girl, so bloody corpses are officially off the Halloween list).  To light them we used these very cool little LED light pucks…three bucks each! The pucks worked great, except that they were puck-shaped, not spotlight-shaped. It turned out an empty Diet-Pepsi can fit perfectly around the puck once we cut the ends off. Now they looked like spotlights…but how to mount ‘em out in the yard? I looked around the garage and spotted these nice ¼” by four foot long dowels. A little loop of nylon wire tie fished through the back of the puck led through a little hole drilled in the dowel…dude – adjustable, stakeable battery powered spotlights!

My wife cleaned up the yard and tossed the spotlight/stick units on my workbench.  I put torn shirts and stuff on her sewing table, she puts bits and pieces of stuff I leave around the house on my workbench.  I came to work on the my bridge but was barred from the bench from all these stupid sticks. What did I buy them for in the first place?  Oh yeah, power poles!

If you cut a 48” dowel into three equal pieces, you get three 16” lengths, which works as 24’ scale poles in 1/18th scale.  I figured what the hey, that seems like a good height for a power pole! I cut my 1/4×1/4 inch strip wood into 3 inch lengths to make the crossbeams.

Last time I attempted this little project I carved a nice curved little divot in the back of the crossbeam to accommodate the pole. As you can see the picture, it didn’t work so good; rather dumb to fight gravity with Plumber’s Goop and a nail. Instead I carved a ¼” notched into the pole to hold the crossbeam. Now the pole holds the crossbeam nice and firm, and the Plumber’s Goop and nail combo just makes sure it stays in place. I know, I know, brilliant. I used the Simul-Dremel to do the carving, and it came out pretty nice!

My daughter has this very nice little X-acto pencil sharpener mounted to her desk. It works great on making a killer point on the end of the pole…if you don’t tell her I used it for that, I certainly won’t.

I jabbed the pointy end of the poles into an empty cardboard box and blasted ‘em with black Rust-Oleum to seal out the weather. Then I oversprayed them with brown Rust-Oleum to make them look more wood-like.  Unfortunately, stuck in a box like that, with just that simple crossbar, the picture below looks to me like a scale model of Gethsemane.

My daughter’s  Make-A-Bracelet set supplied a reasonably fine wire to attach wee little beads to simulate the insulators. The wire holds the beads down, and a drop of Crazy-Glue Gel makes sure they stay there. I like the semi-translucent blue plastic of the insulators…looks to me like glass.

There’s an adage about using the right tool for the right job…I’ll have to study up on that one. Way down there at the end of the Ukrainian Station platform there’s a nifty place for a power pole. The biggest drill bit I own that’s smaller than an inch is 3/16”. I drilled a sweet little 3/16” hole to accommodate a ¼” dowel. Oops.  No problem, I’ll just gently drive the dowel into the hole with a few gentle taps with this hammer here. This 4lb Engineer’s hammer. BAM!!!! Well, now the dowel’s in there nice and tight. Unfortunately, I rather cracked it at the mitered crossbeam joint. Not meant to withstand that kind of a whuppin’, doncha know.

So now we have an effective, efficient and cool-looking power pole design. I stuck the other three prototypes between the tracks in the Parisian Turnout. I am surprised each time I walk past at how inhabited the place looks. Just a simple detail brings a ton of life to this forlorn section of the railway!

Wires? That’s this weekend. Once I have the wire, I’ll be able to figure out how far to space the poles to get a realistic drape on the wires…is that drape or droop? Anyway, wire’s a’comin’ this weekend!

I wish, when I’d been working on the Pola railway station and the Forces of Valor farm cottage, that I’d used epoxy instead of Plumber’s Goop. If I had, I could have yelled “epoxy on BOTH your houses!”  Alas, my wife would have said it’s an old joke and my seven year old wouldn’t have gotten it and my 18 year old daughter would have rolled her eyes but told her friends. Alas.

I’ve been thinking a lot about electricity…you could say my thoughts were fairly buzzing! Getting it from Paris to Peking will be quite a challenge, but I think I’ve come up with the Power Pole Design that will serve:

I bought a bunch of 1/4″ dowels for something…I think it was actually for building these power poles.  It’s funny…I’ve been using them for so many things I rather forgot that I bought them for this project! Anyway, they’re three feet long, so I can get two power poles from one dowel. I reckon I’ll Rust-Oleum ‘em to keep them from warping.  If they’re 18 scale feet high, that’s twelve real inches. With six inches stuck into the ground, that’s a half of a dowel right there. I figure Zorro the Wonder Dog can’t knock ‘em over if they’re six inches into the ground!

I actually built one of these things, sort of.

Now, back when I was thinking all excitedly about the locomotive conversion I’d gotten myself all worked up over 1/4″x1/4″ strip wood…sticks? I actually started on a combine in 1/18th scale, using the strip wood for the cross bracing on a plywood chassis. Yes, it looked cool, but now I know a chassis built to the monstrous dimensions I cooked up will never fit on the railway.

There’s an adage about looking before one leaps: forget that one. Just jump right in there with both feet and let the chips fall where they may, that’s my motto! Scale shmale! Clearance shmearance! It’ll all work out in the end.

Anyway, now I have a nice supply of 1/4″x1/4″ sticks.  Ahem.

I routed out a nice little curvy schwoop in the back of a 3 inch piece of stick and epoxied that to the pole. I thought it would be more scale like to drive a nail through the crossarm and into the pole. CRAACK. On my second attempt, I drilled a hole into which to drive the nail. But my nail is smaller in diameter than my drill bit…I know, it sounds like a personal problem…and my nail fell out. Lord, why does this have to be so hard?

The real problem comes in getting the bead insulators to stick to the crossarm. I figured to drill a hole in the crossarm and thread a tiny wire loop around the insulator. The insulator is epoxied to the underside of the arm for strength while the wire pokes through for show and stability.

Look at this little gem of a plan here:

I thought and thought about how to get electricity into the China Section using these power poles, and that, my friend, is my plan. Pretty cool, huh?

The next challenge: figuring out how many of these darned things to make.

Epoxy on both your houses. That’s pretty good…

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!

I called a meeting of the board of the Paris to Peking Railway company this afternoon. I’d have held the meeting in Paris, but, frankly, I haven’t cleared the weeds yet!

The subject on the table was electrification, and the meeting was serious.

Here is the issue: Sunday is the now world-famous Wyatt Day Exhibition on the P-to-P Railway. This young chappy will show up all doe-eyed and innocent, expecting an exciting display of garden railroading fireworks.

“Gentlemen,” I asked, “what have we got?” What I got was a room full of blank looks.

The chief engineer stands up and gives me this report: “The P-to-P Railway has severe operational issues that hinge on the choice of motive power.” He then details the problems with a nifty handout.

Track-Supplied Electrical Power: Turnout issues still not resolved in the China Section, resulting in only partial operation in that area. Further, hidden wiring issues in the Parisian Turnout cause the LGB 0-4-0 to spin its wheels backwards once it clears the turnout to enter the Parisian Section. Obviously there are wiring connections there I have yet to discover! The net result is a nifty looking train that will run the lenght of the main line, about 60% of the China Section, and none of the Parisian Section. As it cannot complete a loop, the train must run the main line engine pushing in 50% of its trips.

Battery Supplied Power: The New Bright locomotive has the ability to complete the China Loop and travel to the very end of the rails in the Parisian Loop. But the design characteristics of the locomotive make it too light to handle the rail “irregularities” in the China Loop. The Bachmann conversion is not complete, and requires some serious intellectual overhauls before it can enter service. The Net Result: The battery-powered 2-6-0 can cover 100% of the China Loop in theory, the entire main line, and all available rail in the Parisian Loop. But weight issues will mean frequent derailments and much wailing and gnashing of teeth.

So, which should we choose? The dirctors are all leaning toward the battery option, as it’s a technology with which they are familiar.

The Chief Engineer slams his fist on the table, upsetting his ashtray and sending his lit cigar skittering across the table and into the lap of Wilmer Fitzgibbons, milque-toast philanthropist and primary financial supporter of the project. Fitzgibbons fixes me with an uncharacteristically nasty glare – it’s clear the pastrami sandwich luncheon wasn’t to his liking.

“It’s transformer supplied DC power you want,” he thunders. “You can manage your locomotive wherever it happens to be-you can’t do that with your simple on-off battery power! You have finesse, control, and ease of operation: the 0-4-0 is plenty heavy enough to handle the China Loop! Don’t be a bunch of babies holding on to outdated technologies out of fear! Embrace change, you bunch of lily-livered cowards!”

The board of directors cowers under this assault.

It is actually the PR guy who breaks the stalemate. He stands up and speaks softly.

“The four-year-old Wyatt is a fan of Thomas the Tank Engine.”

Well, he’s right, of course. The boy was stone cold on the New Bright, with its D&RGW profile. But he was dying to see the 0-4-0T go, because it’s a European profile tank engine.

That cuts it, I’m afraid. Unless I can lay my hands on a European tank engine that’s battery powered and carries the batteries in boiler, we’re going electrical on Sunday.

I adjourn the meeting of the board of directors with a hearty thanks and handshakes all around.
Mr. Fitzgibbons gives me the now cold cigar and admonishes me to watch for a bill from his cleaners and the hotel maitre’d has his hand out. I put the cigar butt in it and tell him “want a tip? Don’t smoke.”

Hey, times are tough for everyone!

The number one rule of playing chess is this: when in doubt move a pawn. In other words, when you don’t know what to do, do something else.

Such is the case on the Paris to Peking Railway. As you know we’ve spent a lot of time reworking that China Section. We went from decimated rails to new mountains to restored rails to out and out electrification. That’s a lot of stuff!

Frankly, and just between you and me, I’m stumped by that short in the tracks (do me a favor and don’t tell anyone, okay?). I know it’s the turnout wiring…the fellow who built this thing had it niftily wired so that the main line would automatically reverse polarity as the train passed through the turnout. But the wiring has been mangled by dogs and me (yes, I’ll fess up to it – hey, I was all for battery operation and there all these wires poking out of the ground!), but mostly the dogs. Today I found a long oblong box with the name Lehmann on it, and a terribly corroded motor inside connected to a rack and pinion assembly. Now, I didn’t do that. Anyway, I’m stymied.

The bonehead PR guy on the P-to-P Ry (that would be me, too) promised an exhibition for four-year-old Wyatt on Sunday, and heads will roll if we’re not ready.

So, I decided to move north, up the line towards Paris. We had already cleared the Kazakhstani bridge. Now we had to clear and clean the rails in the Ukraine and work through the turnout into Paris. I hit two obstacles on my way to Paris, and they both occurred in the Ukraine section.

The first obstacle was the cypress tree which the original builder planted along the side of the concrete roadbed. Oh, sure, I’m sure it looked “just like a pine tree” back when it was young. And I’m certain his wife planned to trim it like a bonsai tree. Well, they sold the house, and now the darned thing is five feet tall. Some deft work with the hatchet and the four pound Engineer’s Hammer, or Trackside Tree Modification Tool, did the trick rather well.

It’s funny, but now that we’ve gone electric, I’m running the crackers out of the little LGB 0-4-0 given to me by my brother in law in Pennsylvania. It’s a little tank, both literally and figuratively. But there are two passenger cars that came with it, and they are like the nasty wagons in Thomas the Tank Engine. They just want to fly off the track. If it’s not a clearance problem it’s a gauge issue. If it’s not a gauge issue it’s a stick between the rails, or something stuck alongside the track that catches on the steps, or some other unseen thing that knocks them off the track. I couldn’t believe how smoothly the entire train ran from the Paris turnout all the way up the backside of the hill in China, and at full throttle. But on the return trip, BAM, the blue car flew off the rails, and would not make it no matter what through the Ukraine section.

Close inspection revealed a dip in one rail, with a rather nasty kink in the rail itself. It looks like I may have inadvertently dropped my four pound Trackside Tree Modification Tool at some earlier point and dinged the rail.

The engineering department got right on it, using a Track Height Adjustment Tool (or a screwdriver to us laymen) to raise the rail up to the right height. Zoom, as good as new.

Paris, my friend, is a mess. I keep referencing that History Channel show Life After People because every three feet of this abused railway looks like it ought to be featured on that show! But the worst, the very worst, is what will someday be Paris. Missing track, plants, weeds, bees, ants, you name it, picture it at its worst and have a nightmare about it, and my Paris section is STILL worse!

So, what have we accomplished? Well, I’d say safely 80% of the line between Paris and China is operable. You can travel south from the Paris Turnout, which has been cleared, all the way through the China Turnout, east around the bend, and within three feet of the China Turnout to begin the return trip. Then you must back up all the way to Paris…how humiliating!

I’ve got to figure out how this guy wired the track and fix it, or replicate it, or bypass it, or something, in the next day or so…before the return of Wyatt!

The LGB power pack developed an interesting symptom today. I actually spotted it yesterday, but verified it today. My little LGB 0-4-0 runs fine forward, but is very slow backwards. At first I thought it was the locomotive. But I threw the big Bachmann 4-6-0 and it did the same thing.

I thought it might be the transformer, so I dug out the crummy little black box that came with the Bachmann. Same thing: plenty of power forward but creeping speed backward.

My 7 year old daughter noticed my concern, and, as we obviously weren’t going to be having a good time on the railway, asked if she could play with that thing.

“What thing is that?” I asked.

“That thing, with the wires on it. That’s cool!”

That thing with the wires on it turned out to be my little GE multimeter. I had forgotten all about it!

Armed with the multi-meter, it was time to set down to some serious testing.

TEST 1: Verify that the powerpack works. We pulled the power leads off the rails and set them safely side-by-side. Then we set the throttle on the LGB transformer to full ahead. Next we set the mulltimeter to 10 volts DC. Finally, we touched a probe to each of the leads. The meter pegged over. We reversed the power setting and the leads. The needle pegged again.
RESULT: Plenty of power coming out of the transformer. Transformer eliminated as a suspect.

TEST 2: Test the LGB locomotive. Although we verified the odd power dropping with the 2-6-0, the engineering department on the P-to-P Ry wanted proof that the 0-4-0 wasn’t to blame. We flipped the LGB locomotive on its back and touched the track power supply leads from the LGB transformer directly to the pickup shoes on the 0-4-0. Plenty of wheel spin forward. We reversed the power pack. An equal amount of spin in reverse.
RESULT: The LGB 0-4-0 locpmotive works just fine in either direction. Eliminated as suspect.

TEST 3: Test the Track. We reconnected the power leads from the LGB transformer to the main line. We made sure there were no visible cross-connectors such as screwdrivers lying across the rails (one of my specialties), and then we powered up to full forward. We touched one probe to the north rail, one to the south. The needle pegged. We reversed the transformer and tested the rails again. The needle moved to and remained at the halfway mark. AH HAH!
RESULT: There is a direct short somewhere on the track. Gentlemen, we have found our suspect!

Now, my mother didn’t raise no dummies, although with me she got pretty close! I had a feeling that the short was occurring somewhere over there on the hill in the China Section. There are two LGB accessory boxes, each labeled 1501, embedded between the rails. I pulled the cover off of one and found a selection of resistors. I quickly put the cover back on. “That’s electronics, son, you don’t want to touch that!” The second box, however, revealed sets of wire connectors labeled 1A, 1B, 2A and 2B. Messing around with these guys, I was able to isolate the China Loop from the main line.

Checking the multi-meter, I found that the LGB transformer now worked exactly as designed, with plenty of power in both directions. AH HAH! The short is in the China Loop!

My plan is to travel down the China Section, one piece of flex track at a time, disconnecting it from the piece ahead of it, until I find the piece that is causing the short.

When my wife asks me what in heaven’s name I’m doing in the backyard, I believe I will safely be able to say that I’m crawling through the dirt looking for my shorts!

We’ve come to that point in our garden railway wherein we must either cut bait or get off the pot relative to our motive power options. The Paris to Peking Railway board of directors prefers battery powered locomotives for their simplicity, low cost and ease of operation. But the chief engineer insists track powered motive stock is the way to go for centrality of operational control, consistent performance, and infinitely higher quality. The PR guys point out that we promised four-year-old Wyatt we’d have most of the line operational by next Sunday, too. The little boy’s glassy-eyed response was like a death sentence if we don’t get it running!

Looking at the locomotives currently on the PtoP Ry’s roster we see two of each kind of operation. On the battery side the New Bright 2-6-0 is out because of light weight, and the converted Bachmann 4-4-0 is out as incomplete and suffering from design issues. That eliminates the battery fleet. On the track powered list we have the LGB 0-4-0 which has performed well to date, and the Bachmann 4-6-0 that cannot negotiate the tight turn in the China Section. The LGB is the obvious winner. Plus, it’s a tank engine, and Wyatt’s a fan of Thomas the Tank Engine.

I have yet to climb into the attic and see if I have any other transformers, so the flyweight transformer that came with the LGB is the power supply of choice. Now there comes the question of polarity. The question is moot when running battery powered locomotives because they don’t care about track power. But it’s a big issue on the PtoP Ry when we go electric.

Here’s the situation. The track powered locomotive heads south down the main line. The right rail is positively charged. The left rail is the negative ground. The train passes through the China Section turnout and climbs the hill. The rails take it east, around a curve and to the west, and head it north towards the turnout again. Coming through the turnout it’s headed north onto the main line. The problem is that we’ve reversed the direction of the locomotive but have done nothing about the main line’s power. The locomotive is expecting the right rail to be positive, but it’s negative. And the left rail, which was negative, is now positive. The locomotive skids to a halt and backs itself into the turnout. If we’re lucky. If there are fifteen cars behind it we have a train wreck! Sir Topham Hat would say “You are causing confusion and delay!”

The turnouts each feature a small section of electrically isolated track between them and the loops of rail behind them, so there’s no conflict of energies in the loops. But there needs to be an electrical switch somewhere to change the polarity of the main line.

The simplest solution my addled brain has achieved so far is to make each of the turnouts a one-way gate. The China Section turnout, for example, currently allows the locomotive to head south up the hill or east across the trestle. Depending upon which choice the operator/engineer makes, there is a polarity decision that must be made; if he heads south, the outside rail remains positive, but it must be turned negative if he goes east. If we make an operational rule that he can only go south, there is no switching required as far as polarity goes in the China Section. Those polarities can then be hardwired. A simple switch can then be employed to flip the polarity between the rails on the main line.

Mind you, this is merely a stopgap measure to ensure operability before Wyatt shows up on Sunday. Once the pressure put on us by that idiot of a PR guy (that would be me!) is eased, we can wire the loops correctly. That is what the second diagram is all about.

Boy! It takes a lot of thinking to get around this stuff!

Training Wheels Update: remember how I explained about using my brand new tap and die set to freshen the threads on the end of the axle of my daughter’s bicycle to facilitate the installation of new, expensive training wheels, but I stupidly cut the threads to the WRONG PITCH because I wasn’t patient? Well, I went to Green Thumb International here in Ventura (those guys have everything!) and bought two M10 1.5 nuts for $.69 each. I bought two because I always screw one up. The first one threaded a little too easily, but then tightened down nicely with my 17mm socket wrench. DONE! Not only done, but she can actually ride the thing and nothing has fallen off!