Poolside Rails

I had something of a revelation yesterday. I was sitting on the…well, I was reading the August issue of Garden Railways Magazine. There’s a great article in there by Kevin Strong detailing the vagaries of scale in Garden Railroading.

If you’re a garden railroader you already know that Gauge 1, our most standard gauge for outdoor use, only refers to the distance between the rails, not to the scale of trains running on them. For honest-to-Pete standard prototype trains, the accurate scale can be between 1/32 and 1/29. Narrow gauge trains range from 1/24 through 1/20.3.

That is, of course, unless you’re Dr. Rocket Scientist, here, who blithely decides to convert HIS railway to 1/18th scale. Why 1/18th? Well, because my little girl likes Polly Pockets, and she’s roughly 1/18th (Polly Pockets, not my little girl). And there are those older GI Joe guys that scale out to that size…I’ve got a bunch of them. And there are Burago and Maisto die cast cars that are both affordable and 1/18th in scale. Shall we make a list of model railroad structures and/or rolling stock manufactured in 1/18th? Go ahead, I’ll wait. You may as well make a list of Latvian astronauts, or species of coconut trees endemic to Norway. The answer is the same.

I decided I would start with the Bachmann Big Hauler 1/22.5 scale 4-6-0 locomotive. I planned to just bump that fellow up to a nifty 1/18 scale 4-4-0. While I was at it, I figured I would make a nice spacious cab for the GI Joe guys. Actually, my little guys are CORPS! Fellows – they are civilian guys that are fully posable, although I ‘m not certain they’re still in production. If you saw Thursday’s post, you’ll know that I wisely failed to consider clearance when I built my station platform. My 1/18th conversion project is in severe jeopardy.

The Paris to Peking Railway Company holds a meeting of the board Saturday afternoon.

“What is all this balderdash about?” asks the CEO.

“I canna build ye yer rolling stock and meet either your timetable or yer budget,” the Chief Engineer whines.

“What???” The CFO chokes on his cigar.

“’tis true! Wee bonnie lass will be graduatin’ from college ere I can get just that locomotive done!”

“It’s a disaster,” sobs the PR guy.

“Well,” blusters the CEO, “what scale CAN you do?”

“There’s plenty of struc-yures in 1/20.3,” the Chief Engineer pulls at his red beard pensively.

“Oh, dash it all,” the CEO thunders, “go ahead with 1/20.3. Where’s my brandy?”

So, there it is. It turns out 1/20.3 is about 90% of 1/18, which means a six foot man in 1/18 stands around 5’4” in 1/20.3. A seven foot doorway scales down to 6’3” or so. That’s acceptable, isn’t it?

What it means for the Details Department is no placing figures right next to doorways. It means lopping off the legs of locomotive engineers …

“What???” gargles the Chief Engineer. “Ye’re doin’ what to mah men?”

But it also means that rolling stock, particularly the Bachmann Spectrum series, is now available.

The only problem I’m seeing is that the Paris to Peking Railway is European, while most of the 1/20.3 stock I’ve seen is American prototype. That’s going to be an issue.

The board meeting is adjourned, and the air, now quiet, still smells of cigars and spilt brandy. It’s been a big day on the P-to-P Ry. Oddly enough, the decision to go to 1/20.3 makes the garden railway about 10% smaller…go figure!

I have such a long list of apologies to make, I don’t think I’ll ever get to them all. So, instead, I’ll apologize for missing yesterday’s posts. My nephew dropped in out of the blue and rather absorbed my posting time. Sorry.

Another area of apologies, as long as we’re on a roll, is for the failure to remove the stump. It remains an obstacle for the Paris to Peking Railway, and well, a stump!

My wife and I decided to take our youngest daughter and the dogs to Mt. Pinos, here in Southern California. If you haven’t been, and you most likely haven’t, you will be amazed. The Chumash, the Native American tribe that used to inhabit this area, thought that the 8,835 foot high promontory was the very center of the universe. If you ever get the chance to go up there, you won’t disagree.

Anyway, that took up Saturday. And Sunday was taken up with doing the stuff I should have been doing on Saturday, and, hey, suddenly it was Monday. And I do mean suddenly!
So, we’re putting the Stump Remoal program on hold for a little bit.

“Bully,” roars the Chairman of the Board of Directors. “Let’s put it off for a decade!”

“Have ye gone daft?” grumbles the Chief Engineer.

We’ve been working on clearing the rails, or at least the roadbed, around the Paris Loop, north of the Parisian Turnout. Part of the reason for the dilapidation of the Paris Loop, it turns out, is that the area was overrun by Creeping Charlie…the plant, not the fellow. Unchecked, the plant buried the existing railroad foundations and accessories under dirt and plant detritus. Amazing what these plants can do, I tell you. Amazing!

One of the items to emerge from what now seems like more of an archaeological dig than a model railroad is what appears to be a lamppost. It has a base about an inch and a half in diameter, through which is stuck a whale of a screw, itself still attached to a plank of an old scale deck. A round pole, G-scale, of course, rises out of the base, and terminates in the remains of a broken light bulb. There appears to be no facility for a shade, although I’m certain there was one at some point.

Two other items of a more electrical nature rose from the wreckage as well. One was a junction box, with outlets in it! Broken off of its conduit but still attached by wires, I have yet to test its connectivity. If it works, this could be a new way to provide electricity to the entire railway from a very convenient location.

Accompanying the outlet is a tag strip – you can see it in the picture. I rifled through my 1996 LGB catalog (you mean there’s a newer one?!?), but could find nothing like it. I think this device will be of great service in figuring out the wiring of the Parisian Loop, if I can ever get it cleaned up!

As you’ll recall, I had a stroke about six years ago. Certain details have been completely erased from my memory. Digging through this Creeping Charlie detritus and retrieving bits of the railroads history is like pulling back cobwebs. On one hand it’s fascinating to find this stuff. On the other hand it’s kind of creepy…what did happen?

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!

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!

You can blame it on the New Bright 2-6-0. It occurred to me the other day that the engineers that designed that thing never expected it to run on a real railway. The locomotive is extremely light, relying on the weight of its motor to keep it on the track. And since the batteries are in the tender, they’re dead weight…at least having the batteries in the locomotive itself adds some traction. Having them in the tender is rather an insult to injury as the 2-6-0 has to work to haul ‘em around!

I’m afraid the New Bright guys designed a locomotive that works great under the Christmas tree, going around and around in tawdry little circles, but can’t compete in the real world. And Garden Railroading is Real Railroading.

I have a temper. I’m not proud of it. But, there it is. The flyweight 2-6-0 doesn’t like my railway, no matter what I do to it. It completes the China Curve on its own, unless the connection between the tender and the locomotive comes loose, as it frequently does because the end of the plug comes into contact with the horn of the tender coupler. But hook a car up to it and you have an unending series of stops and stalls that would try the patience of Ghandi!

All right, the 2-6-0 is out until I can get my track under control. How about the modified 4-4-0, cut down from the Bachmann 4-6-0? Eh, no. Gauge and turning radius questions abound, along with the need for a pony truck under the cab. Hmm.

The I spotted the little LGB 0-4-0 locomotive my brother in law gave me for Christmas a couple of years back. I have a power pack for it…I wonder…

Track as badly beaten as mine is not an automatic shoo-in for electrification. It’s not a long continuous stretch of rails, it’s sections of track that have been attacked by time and animals alike. A decade of neglect can play havoc with electrical connections.

However, I found a good place to attach the leads from the transformer. A rather robust polishing with fine grit sandpaper, and, son of a gun, that little 0-4-0 made most of the China Curve! That six foot long trestle is a challenge because it’s tough to get the sandpaper onto the rails at the center. The south side of the curve, along the temporary retaining fence, is a challenge because the area is still under constant attack as a result of major canine activity. In fact, I had a major breach just today!

The real connection problem, however, is that spot where the ficus roots separated the rails. That area cuts in and out of connectivity. That area still needs some under track support as well, as the weight of the locomotive appears to open the rail joiners.

But, and this is a big but, that 0-4-0 runs as smooth as glass over the China Curve when I do get power to it. Smooth as glass, like all my bump and jolt problems were more the result of a lightweight locomotive than back tracklaying.

So I cleared the track through the China Grade as best I could, I connected the rails as best I could, and I polished the crackers out of every inch of that track. The 0-4-0 makes it from the China Turnout across the big trestle, around the curve and up the hill. The bad track joiner is at the crest of the hill, and that’s where the 0-4-0 stalls. But it’ll pull two passenger cars that came with it through the route to that point as smooth as glass, no derailments or anything.

Now comes the next problem, which we’ll look at tomorrow: wiring the turnouts. I have no problem designating a fixed routing for the turnouts; you go east at the China Turnout, north at the Paris Turnout. But, as there is only one main line, the polarity must switch as the locomotive enters and exits the turnouts. We’ll deal with it tomorrow.

Another little issue: your ColdHeat Soldering Iron is rather useless when it comes to soldering electrical leads to G-Scale brass rail. The rail acts like a heat sink, and that little battery powered soldering iron doesn’t have the oomph to get the rail locally hot enough to melt solder. Drat.

All right, I did it. Yesterday’s metric experiment convinced me that the Paris to Peking Railway suffers from major gauge warpage around the China Curve. My friend Jim the Neighbor who has a garden railway in his front yard for all the world to see is convinced my track should not be firmly embedded in the ground. I agree with him.

As you know, the PtoP RY is both screwed to its concrete roadbed at every seventh tie…I double checked my numbers, and it is every seventh, not eighth, as previously reported…and is embedded into a gravel-studded cement. There is approximately zero flexion available to the ties. As a result, rather than the tie/rail combination responding to changes in temperature, the rails do it individually. That’s not such a problem along a straightaway, but it is a disaster around a curve.

Last year, before I had any brains in my head, I tore out the Paris Curve (le Curve Parisienne) because of the poor gauge issue. Had I known then what I know now, I would have left the track in place and done what I did today.

It was easier than I thought it would be. Most of the seventh-tie screws came out easily. I decided to use my fake Dremel tool to drill the heads off the recalcitrant ones, but the brass screws melted under the steel drill bit and made a molten hole in the tie. It actually looks pretty cool.

The four-pound Engineer’s Hammer, when applied to the rear end of a steel paint scraper, does a nifty job of popping off that old cement.

If You Must Do A Job Like This, here’s a word to the wise: it took me a while to get the hang of it, but it’s very important to get your scraper blade completely underneath a tie. I found that the blade wanted to skip over the top of the tie and would invariably smack against the rail, weakening the tie’s grip on it. Instead, drive the scraper at a steep downward angle at the end of the tie, so that the blade can slide under it.

With the screws removed, and with a scraper blade safely under four or five ties, I found I was able to lift about two feet of track high enough to get a second scraper underneath to clear away the cement. It takes a lot of scraping and then a lot of sweeping, but the end result is worth it.

The gauge problems seem to occur in the same places as yesterday, although I am certain they will even out with a little working of traffic over the rails. Today was really a test to see how destructive such a process is, and whether or not it’s even feasible. Clearly the results are impressive, so now I can carry on farther up the line. Releasing the track from its bondage up the line will ease the entire tie/rail structure and should allow the gauge to even out even further.

The finished track even looks better – much more prototypical despite the occasional burn hole in the ties! I know the guy who built the railway was trying to simulate ballast and keep it in place with his cement. But in using those small white pebbles he simulated a ballast made out of softball-sized rocks! Now it remains to figure out to make a ballast that will remain.

As you know, Garden Railroading is Real Railroading. In real railroading the ballast merely lies along the track, and is renewed periodically by work crews. Perhaps that’s the right program for our railroad!

I’ve been watching my New Bright 2-6-0 bob and weave as it goes around the curve in my China Section. I have also been aware that there could be a problem with the consistency of the gauge due to the rails being anchored down rather than floating on the ground.

Watching closely, I noticed some interesting behavior on the part of my little 2-6-0. It seems to waddle around the curve. The flanges on the drivers are sometimes between the rails, sometimes above the rails, and sometimes so far below the rails that the actual wheel slides in between, too.

Well, the chief engineer on the Paris to Peking Railway needs metrics, not stories. Spare me your anecdotes, sir, and present with cold, hard numbers. A few quick cuts on a piece of wood with a hand saw, a dash of adhesive, and the application of a two inch class-A threaded fastening device results in the Paris to Peking Railway Primary Metric Tool: the Gauge Gauge.

Enough silliness. I cut a piece of wood to fit exactly between the rails of a piece of plastic track. The plastic doesn’t flex, and as the rails are molded to the ties, they cannot lose their gauge. I then stuck a handle on it, and, voila, a metric device.

There is a ding in my rails, right at the center of the tunnel that passes below the rails (the result of an injudicious swing with the Engineer’s Hammer). Using the length of the Gauge Gauge as my distance measurer, I began measuring the curve from the ding south around the bend to the temporary retaining fence. Here’s what I found:
Segment Condition
Segment 1,2 – Wide
Segment 3,4 – Okay
Segment 5-9 – Wide
Segment 10-13 – Very Wide
Segment 14 – Wide
Segment 15 – Okay
Segment 16 – Narrow
Segment 17-19 – Okay
Segment 20 – Wide
Segment 21-23 – Very Wide
Segment 24 – Okay
Segment 25,26 – Okay
Segment 27 – Okay
Segment 28, 29 – Very Narrow
Segment 30 – Super Narrow
Segment 31-33 – Okay
Segment 34 – Narrow
Segment 35 – Super Narrow
Segment 36,37 – Okay
Segment 38,39 – Wide

This track has been anchored down to cold, hard concrete for well over ten years. Every eighth tie is actually bolted down, and then the entire structure is embedded in a cement of some sort, into which the builder sprinkled white gravel to simulate ballast.

As the day/night and seasonal temperature changes have worked this rigid structure, the gravel has tended to pop out, causing havoc with my rolling stock. Goodness, sounded like a real engineer for a second there, eh?

Talking about the problem is all fine and good. Now we have ourselves some hard data with which we can work to try and rectify the problem.

Here’s the next step: I’m going to unbolt the ties and see if I can knock that cement layer loose. Once the track is independent of the ground, I’ll see if I can smooth out that curve using my Gauge Gauge as a gauge straightener. I may have to make another Gauge Gauge, as I’m not certain the wood will hold up to such abuse.

Then, when I think I’ve eased the pressure on the rails and let ‘em straighten out, we’ll use a fresh Gauge Gauge again. I imagine the results will be more satisfactory. I’ll let you know!

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…