Poolside Rails

Many is the time we’ve said that Garden Railroading is Real Railroading. I believe it’s safe to say that the analogy goes forward into other aspects of the garden railroader’s life. If it happens to the railroader it must somehow affect the railroad, too.

Mother-in-law Marjorie passed away this past Saturday.  She was a resident here at the Turner residence, a loved and respected member of the household.  Her bright and effervescent spirit will be deeply missed.  She was the life of the party, the fun of the game, and a great joy to be around.

She came to live with us nearly four years ago for what was to be a short visit while she recuperated from a recent hospital stay. My wife and I moved into the garage, yielding up the master bedroom so that she would be more comfortable.

Our offices are out here, now, too, and we’ve rather made an adjustment to this accommodative lifestyle. Even my workbench is out here. Until Saturday, so was our bed! Cold? You betchum, but we didn’t mind.

My wife and I moved immediately back into the house in order to provide a comforting presence for our eight year old daughter, who lost her top-of-the-A-List  best friend.

Marjorie almost made it to ’91. When she was a little girl, refrigerators had yet to be invented. McDonald’s, even Disney, were just glimmers in people’s eyes. Her world was a quieter place – that’s for sure! She lost her parents early in her life, and her growing up wasn’t easy.

She eventually married Ed, an underage recruit in the U.S. Army who named his mule Margie after his best girl when he was serving in Panama. After they married the military took them all over the world, although, oddly enough, they ended up in Lancaster, California.  She saw times and places at which one can only marvel.  Her husband knew Chuck Yeager personally.  That story about the bear? That’s his story….if you look under  the post called “Birthday Bash Beleaguers Railway Reporting” you’ll see it.

Anyway, the point is that we’ll sorely miss Miss Margie. She brought a terrific life to the household, and her loss is keenly felt here in the Turner homestead. She was a terrific, terrific person, and if you didn’t get the chance to know her, you have really missed something special.

Okay, well, maybe it’s not a tragedy per se, but it’s a great picture, huh?

Today is very first day of January in the Year ’10, and my wife and my littlest one went down to Pasadena to watch the Rose Parade. Unlike the gazillions of people who brave the predawn hours and freezing cold to be the first to sit on the coooollllldddd concrete sidewalks and gawk and stare at the floats, we usually leave our home in Ventura at a respectable 8:30 in the morning. It takes a little over an hour to get to Pasadena from here, but the Rose Parade moves very slowly. By the time we get to our spot, which is about two miles from where the parade starts, it’s about 10:00, and the parade is just arriving! The crowds are thinner, the parade is still going, and everybody’s happy. Except this time, when we left a little bit late, and the offramp we always use was closed! We missed about half the parade…believe me, the parade is very cool to watch, but a little of it goes a long way, so no hearts were broken.

Anyway, we didn’t get home until late this afternoon. It being the very beginning of a new year, I decided to try the Bachmann Not-So-Big-Hauler in the China Section. The rails are a little dirty what with the plantings and the rain, but a quick skaboodle with a paintbrush at least got the leaves off of ‘em!

But the China Turnout proved to be a major challenge.

As you may have read in a previous post, the coupler on the aft end of the Bachmann NSBH (Not-So-Big Hauler) isn’t  a coupler at all but a down-pointing hook which lies too close to the locomotive for the LGB passenger cars’ loop coupler to attach. To fix it, just for today’s run, I used a piece of wire, tied around the LGB’s coupler and formed into a loop for the NSBH’s hook. It worked okay going forward, but going backwards, of course, the wire collapsed…rather like pushing a rope, I’m afraid.

The wire was still acceptable until we reached the China Turnout.  The Troublesome Truck, the red coach, popped over the frog in the turnout and rolled off the rails.  Now, it could have just slipped off the rails and stopped. That would be a nice thing to do. No sir, that didn’t happen. It slipped off the rails all right, but then it rocked from side to side and pitched itself off the raised railway and down the 3 or so feet to the stone walkway below. Kapow!

The problem with the turnout, which I cleaned thoroughly with a paintbrush, turned out to be dirt. Not between the rails, mind you, but underneath, outside the rails, where the actuator bar travels. Dirt built up under there and counter-acted the spring in the switch mechanism, leaving the closure rail just about 1/64 of an inch open…just enough to pop the LGB off the tracks!

Well, no harm done, really, beyond a significant increase in the engineer’s blood pressure and a hint of blue air from all of the French Invective released by yours truly.

After a good little digging with the back end of the paintbrush the problem was cleared up. As you can see, the LGB coaches and the NSBH made it safely across the China Bridge safely.

See? What’s a new year without a little tragedy, a little swearing, and a happy resolution?

Happy New Year to You! I hope all your tragedies are little, and can be resolved with the back end of a paintbrush!

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!

In the excitement and enthusiasm of yesterday’s Exposition, my wife got wild with the clippers and brush clearing tools. Boom! Down came the overgrown tree limbs, rrrrip, up came the tender tendrils of crab grass. The garden railway gained real estate!

What got exposed was Paris…well, perhaps not Paris itself, but certainly the roadbed for the Parisian Loop. And, uh, some other stuff.

Discovered under the plant detritus was an interesting 1/18th scale excursion car I’d built some time ago…

This sounds like a long stretch for an excuse, and it probably is, but I had a stroke about six years ago. Since that event, my memory is shot to crackers. I can learn new things, etc., but there are certain events that completely, completely escape my memory. I can’t, for example, remember the details of my daughter’s birth. I mean, I’m reasonably certain I had something to do with it, but my wife tells me details about being in the delivery room that may as well have happened to some fella in France, because I don’t remember any part of them. Weird, huh?

So, here we are at the Wyatt Exposition Day, and I’m chatting away with Wyatt’s dad about how the railroad has been abused and forgotten for ten years, how it’s a shame the guy before me let it go to ruin, and my wife fishes out this excursion car that I obviously built.

“Honey, do you want to keep this?”

I suddenly remembered that I had a hand in the abandonment of the railway…I sheepishly said “uh, sure” in as small a voice as I could find!

Anyway, the chassis was stolen from a New Bright bobber caboose (I found the body shell in my train cabinet, but could not for the life of me remember what I’d done with the chassis!) and featured an interesting body. Custom built from popsicle sticks and epoxy, the body has been literally buried under thick, moist brush for a good two years. Although suffering from some warpage in the side rails and a little discoloration of the wood (can you spell “black”?), the thing looks pretty good. The first thing I noticed was the crude workmanship, obviously mine, but the first thought I had was “Cool! Working couplers and wheels!”

Another thing discovered, or, in this case, not discovered, was the track for Parisian Loop. As feared, it’s gone. I could blame the dogs, but I do have a vague memory of removing the rails because they had lost their gauge in the middle of the curve. I was young and dumb…you know, it was a couple of years ago…and I tore it all up. At the time I believe I had money. In either case, the cause of the New Bright 2-6-0’s popping off the track was partly gauge issue, but mostly due to the locomotive’s extremely light weight. I know that. Now.

The other big discovery was the wiring ganglia. This, my friend, will take some research, but promises to be a treasure trove of information about how the Parisian Loop is wired!

So, now it’s on to Paris! I’m certain that resolving the wiring of the Parisian Turnout will help me determine the issues surrounding the China Turnout. With those two turnouts working, and with the replacement track I found (a substantial number of LGB brass curved sections), I believe we’ll be 100% within the next two weeks!

It’s cigars all ’round to the Board of Directors on the Paris-to-Peking Railway. The much ballyhooed and concern-raising demonstration of the railway for the four year old Wyatt was an unqualified success!

The Chief Engineer was on hand to personally ensure that the rails were polished extra shiny. He further cleared dirt and debris tumbled onto the tracks by the Canine Units. The Maintenance Operations Manager (that’s MOM to you) made sure food and drinks were on hand and in plentiful supply. The PR Director made sure that all available staff members were sitting on the popsicle stick platform of the Ukraine Station in interesting poses in case of a failure of the main line to impress the guest of honor.

As I feared, question number one was “how come it doesn’t go all the way around the mountain?” Question number two was “well, can you MAKE it go around?” My apologetic explanations were received rather unenthusiastically but without further concern.

The LGB 0-4-0 performed flawlessly, only leaving the track once as the result of a high speed collision with a passenger car incorrectly spotted at a turnout.

“Who let that kid near the controller?”

It stalled only once, away around the turn and into the forbidden territory of the China Section. “My bad,” said Wyatt’s dad, who had gunned the throttle in the wrong direction.

“Who let that kid…oh!”

I thought Wyatt might get a kick out of the New Bright 2-6-0, and sent that down the line unannounced. It rather failed to impress the guest of honor, who was deeply involved in an imaginary game that DID NOT INCLUDE another locomotive. He was rather clear on that point.

But his dad was a fan, and the darn thing successfully entered the Forbidden Zone in the China Section, passing through the turnout to the south, going over the hill, and making it over the trestle and back to the turnout with a hitch. Wyatt’s father and I were most impressed.

You know me-I can’t resist a show. Out came the track powered Bachmann 4-6-0. Now, I KNOW it won’t navigate the China Curve (the wheelbase is far too long for the diameter of that loop), but I figured it would at least be interesting. As anticipated, it generated a lot of “oohs” and “ahs”, although these were more from Wyatt’s dad and me than from Wyatt. It is a pretty cool engine.

I actually assembled a consist of the Bachmann heavyweight coaches. It all worked well until it hit the China Turnout. The 4-6-0 and its tender went east but the coaches overpowered the turnout spring and went south. So did my demonstration.

Here’s the most interesting part: you’ll recall that our guest of honor is just four years old. He seemed to find infinitely more fun running the 0-4-0 by hand, and actually became rather cranky about running it with the transformer! He told us there was a sign at the Paris Turnout that said “all trains must be pushed by hand and not with the thing.” I myself did not see the sign, but I’m a trifle taller than he is!

For all that track cleaning and electrical connection puzzling it turns out the preferred motive power was hand car!

My wife was inspired to start the landscaping in the Parisian Section. The Chief Engineer looks concerned: the small stub of his cigar glows brightly.

It was close, so close! Wyatt’s sister Claire came over to play with my seven-year-old : all hands! Battle stations!

I tell you, those rails shined they were so polished. I tested the little LGB 0-4-0 back and forth, up and down the line from Paris to China. Even the Troublesome Trucks, the two LGB passenger cars, minded themselves.

Station? Done! Track? Clear! Wyatt? Not today! Boy! Hurry up and wait!

So, now, for all interested parties; Wyatt Exposition Day is this Sunday, August 2, at 2:00 PM. No ifs, ands or whatevers.

In the meantime, I decided to try my hand at repairing LGB couplers. The tongue had fallen out of the coupler on one end of the red LGB passenger car…I ask no questions of my daughter as to how it happens and she offers no explanations. There’s a split plastic retaining clip that holds the thing in, and that clip had long gone somewhere on the Paris to Peking Railway roadbed.

I have a Denver & Rio Grande Western bobber caboose that came with the Bachmann locomotive. It’s nicely detailed, but must weigh about a gazillionth of an ounce: I know why they call it a bobber! My stepson was in the Cub Scouts and made a “spirit rock” – this cool potato-sized rock that has a spider painted on it. It’s heavy, and fits perfectly inside the bobber, making it a nice heavy weight car. Well, I don’t plan to tow much behind that caboose, so I used its coupler as a source of parts for the passenger car (and you thought the bobber story wasn’t going to lead anywhere!).

I had a lot of trouble getting that coupler tongue to come off. That folded plastic retaining pin did not want to come loose: it was tough. So tough, in fact, that I broke it in trying to remove it. Well, NOW the coupler tongue came off! I have no spares, so it took some quick engineering.

The retaining pin fits into a hole on the coupler tongue. The back side of the tongue has a nice pocket gouged in it, into which fits the coupler support on the car’s truck. Mister clever here took out his pin vise and drilled a nifty little hole in the coupler support. Using a flanged screw I found in my parts bin, I was able to simulate the retaining pin on the coupler tongue, driving the screw through the hole in the tongue and into the coupler support on the car’s truck. Brilliant! And it works! It’s a trifle stiffer than the plastic retaining pin, but seriously not much. As the screw is of a smaller diameter than the hole on the coupler tongue, it doesn’t bind, threatening to unscrew itself. Plus, as the track is currently wired, the car only makes right turns…let’s see, isn’t righty-tighty, lefty-loosey?

While I had the bobber in the shop to pull the coupler off, I shot its axle ends with Marvel Mystery Lubricant. The can belonged to my late father-in-law, and he must have had it for thirty years. I just took a wild shot and squirted it on the axle ends. My gosh! That stuff makes WD-40 look like tar! I hit all the wheels on both of the Troublesome Trucks, and I can’t believe how smoothly the whole unit runs! Lubrication! Who knew?

I think it’s only fair I announce this administrational change here on the PtoP Ry: Yours truly is now no longer a displaced worker (hold your applause, please)! That’s great news for yours truly! However, my daylight hours will be consumed between the exhausting work I’ll be doing and the 40 mile commute from Ventura to West Hills and back. But, I’ll make you a deal. If you’ll let me have Friday and Saturday nights off, I’ll keep you apprised of the PtoP Ry happenings on the other five days of the week. Deal?

I know what you’re thinking; how much interesting stuff can happen during the week? Trust me, my friend, I’ve got that covered. You’ll see.

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!