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.

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!

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!

Being in the “displaced worker” set is difficult, all the more so because one finds one’s self doing things one wouldn’t have considered in the days of easy income flow. Case in point: training wheels.

This may seem to have nothing to do with garden railroading, and you’re probably right, except that there are skills learned here – skills you’ll someday need on your railroad.

Anyway, training wheels. We got my daughter an inexpensive Schwinn bicycle for Christmas, one of those purple butterfly kid’s numbers with plastic Schwinn training wheels. My stepson decided he could ride the bike himself, bending the cheap steel in the training wheels because he’s 17, not 7. We recently got my older daughter a new bicycle, a Trek, from a real bike shop. My younger daughter tried out the kid’s bicycles that have working training wheels and now wants to learn to ride a bike. So we bought some really nice steel training wheels made by Wald – boy, are they nice, with steel wheels and bushings.

I installed the training wheels quickly on the purple bike. Took the bolts off the end of the axles, pulled off the bent training wheels, fit the Wald units – boy, did they fit nice – and shot the bolts back on. The right bolt was hard to start, but fit nicely once started. The left nut started smoothly but was stiff after just a few turns of the socket wrench. But I was in a rush…had to post to the blog, don’t you know…and didn’t pay much attention, cranking that sucker on.

Once the training wheels were installed, I realized I had set them too high: the bike still wanted to fall over. I loosened the right nut and slid the training wheel down to the right height, tightened the nut, and moved to the left side. The left nut, when loosened, came off. I adjusted the training wheel, but could not get that nut to thread onto the axle.

Looking carefully at the end of the axle, I realized I had stripped it. Not just stripped it mind you, but ground those little threads down until the thing looked like a bullet. I got out the file and tried to clean the grooves between the threads: no good, hands too shaky. I got out the Dremel tool and tried a steel cutting wheel to clean up the threads: no good, hands too shaky and no way to accurately simulate the pitch. Aw, crackers.

I hopped into the Isuzu and rushed off to Harbor Freight and Tools. They have everything in there….most of it a little scary in terms of quality, but they have everything. I’d already spent $27 on the training wheels, and was prepared to spend another $20 on a tap and die set. To my great surprise, the 40 piece set was on sale for just $10.99. I scooped up one that was still wrapped in plastic and shot to the cash register line. Out of the corner of my eye I spotted the letters SAE on the package. OOPS! Most Schwinns are SAE, but the cheap…I mean, inexpensive…Chinese imports are metric. Went back, got the metric set, paid $11.90 total and hurried home. Done.

If you’ve never used a tap and die set, it is an awesome experience. Not pleasant, mind you, but certainly awesome. I picked out one of the M10 dies…the taps are the pointy devices for use in holes, while the dies are to be used on screws and bolts…and fit it to the end of the axle. There’s a nifty handle that grabs onto the round die so that you can use two hands to spin it. There are two M10 dies in the set; a 1.5 and a 1.25. I tried the 1.25 first, forcing it onto the end of the axle and then turning it with the handle. Then I tried the nut, but it just spun. Looking inside the nut, I realized it, too, was stripped. So I stuck the M10 1.25 Tap into that and twisted it with the cool handle in the kit. But it didn’t seem to want to tap straight…I put the nut in the vice and tapped the crackers out of it. Smoothish inside, tapping fellow frustrated.

Fine, I said to myself quite out loud. I took out the M10 1.5 die and shoved that sucker on the end of the axle. It bit nicely, and turned down the axle with the handle really nicely. Little shards of metal peeled off the axle, and, once I’d backed the die off, I had really clean looking threads. Looking carefully, however, I realized I had cut threads to a different pitch than those that were on the axle! I looked around in desperation, and found a pitch gauge that came with the tap and die set (1 of the 40 pieces!). Oh sure, now I find it! It confirmed my suspicions: the inner half of the axle was pitched 1.25, the outer half pitched 1.5. Crackers.

I tried cutting the nut with the M10 1.5 tap, but no luck. I rifled my shop for 1.5 nuts, but no luck. No sir, no luck. So, tomorrow I get to go to Lowe’s to find an M10 1.5 nut so I can fit it to my daughter’s bicycle so she can have training wheels and learn to ride. Maybe I can spend the other $8 I saved on the tap and die set on nuts. Nuts.

That’s the down side: I really screwed up.

Here are the up sides:
-I finally have a tap and die set! I’m certain that the only steel softer than the tap and die set is the metal in that bicycle axle, but we’ll find out.
-Now I know how to work it, sort of. I’m sure my next attempt will be more successful.
-Now you know the pitfalls of inattentive tapping, or dying, or something like that.

If you have never worked with a tap and die set before, take a page from the book. Rifle the set and find the pitch gauge. Measure the teeth on the bolt you’re tapping or dying before you start using the tool!

Garden Railroading is Real Railroading, and the pitfalls are the same. I imagine using a tap and die set will come in handy when scratchbuilding structures. It’s got to be easier that fitting training wheels!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We named him Gilmore because my wife named him Beau. My eldest daughter asked why we called him Beau, and I replied “because his name is not Gilmore.” As soon as I said the word his ears perked up, and he’s responded to it ever since. By jingo, his name really is Gilmore!

I was quite concerned that Gilmore would be a digger, a rooter, a terrorizer of railways, but he’s proven to be quite the opposite. He stays off the tracks, off the landscaping, and out of trouble for the most part. We adopted him from the pound, he having been found by them wandering the streets. Everyone who has met him has said the same thing: whoever owned him before must surely miss this dog. The consensus is that he must have belonged to an elderly man, because he is very well behaved around folks of that seniority and gender. It was too good to last.

Enter Atticus. You see, before we met the real Gilmore (it’s almost impossible to see the real dog when you meet them at the pound), we thought he might be lonely all by himself. We agreed that our complement of dogs would be 2: that’s how we started the year, that’s how we’ll finish it. On the day we picked up Gilmore, we also picked out another dog, the one in cell 14. Dog 14 had a roommate, you see, and someone had cruelly adopted the roomie but left Dog 14 behind. When we met him he was a docile little thing, so nervous you could hear his bones rattle as he shivered. We thought we’d do the nice thing and rescue him. Hmph. He had to have some, uh, work done, so we picked him up today.

The letter is P and that rhymes with T and that stands for Trouble, yes, trouble right here in Poolside Rails city!

As he unfolds, become increasingly accustomed to this his new house on this his first day, I can see that there is indeed a palpable terrorist threat to the Paris-to-Shanghai Railway. The authorities are gravely concerned. He is, shall we say, energetic? And, at nine months old, what would you say…immature? A digger? Oh, yes. A rooter? Without a doubt. A terrorizer of railways? Well, it has yet to be seen, but the Board of Directors is quite concerned.

Tomorrow, however, we’ll be back in business, hopefully acquiring ground cover to patch the holes Dog 14, now named Atticus after the protagonist in To Kill a Mockingbird, is undoubtedly going to dig. He’s already run our three cats out of town, so his scorecard is looking bleak!

The first bridge is already in place, and is rather more like a tunnel. As you’ll recall, the railway is set on a concrete roadbed that is a good six inches thick. I knocked out a section near the apex of the southern turn to provide for drainage from the mountain I had created. The drainage hole was big enough to qualify as a tunnel, and actually now fits thematically with the railroad. It looks rough and simple, much as you’d expect a simple Chinese tunnel to appear at the turn of the twentieth century. That part’s okay, and looks pretty good. But what kind of support would you see on the rail bed itself? Do you suppose there would be handrails along the side?

The second bridge is a road bridge. As motorcars have not yet appeared in China’s countryside, this bridge can be rather simple. Still, it requires a degree of architectural styling to fit the theme. The middle picture is what I have in mind. There’s a great series of articles in Garden Railways Magazine by Ray R. Dunakin III about building real rock retaining walls (look for it at www.trains.com). He built a stunning arch out of natural stones that would look great down there as the road bridge.

The problem is that third bridge. It’s a trestle, six feet in length. As you can see from the bottom picture, it’s quite a piece of crummy work. Don’t get me wrong, it looks good from three feet away. My brother’s a fan of “three foot modeling”…if it looks good from three feet away, that’s all that matters. But the guy who put it together didn’t model a bridge, he just built one. The difference is that it lacks detail, and therefore erodes any sense of accuracy or realism in that part of the railway. It stretches for six feet, which is 108 feet in 1/18th scale, but has no supports underneath. It’s a major bridge, but the modeler before me simply tossed in a cool looking toy bridge.

So, here’s the challenge: Imagine a 108’ long trestle over a rocky gorge. Now picture that it’s for a narrow gauge railway. NOW picture that it is built in China in the late 1800’s. The railway, we assume, is a European, probably French concern, as one end of the line terminates in Paris. If I were the French builders, I would probably use steel arches over the rocks.

But this is another place where garden railroading and reality part ways. The bridge is a major scenic element in the China section of the railway. That bridge has to “look” Chinese. Perhaps I’ll build it out of bamboo rather than steel.

I shouldn’t admit this, but I’m using the Dreamworks movie “Kung Fu Panda” for my research into Chinese architecture. If you haven’t seen the movie you are truly missing something great. The artwork alone is stunning, and perfectly depicts not just a small Chinese village but a huge palace. But I didn’t spot any massive railroad trestles in it…darn!

Yesterday we had to put our dog down. She was 11, and had developed a cyst between her shoulders that caused her incessant pain. Although it broke our hearts to euthanize her, it was truly the best thing for her.

We were reminiscing about our dear Muffin, and how much she liked to dig up the backyard. A memory flickered out of the dim recesses of my mind…Muffin liked to dig. She dug up the original railway – THAT’S why I let it deteriorate – it was the DOG! Now it made sense. Now I remembered the feeling of utter frustration to find my station tilted over on its side, a vast hole in the place of my parking lot. Wires hanging in the air, rails buried under a mound of dirt, it all came back to me.

So, it’s safe to say that garden railroading is CLOSER to real railroading than building in the basement. But in real life, Muffin would have stood about forty feet tall, towering above even my tallest building. Phew, I’m glad we cleared that up!

Well, Muffin’s gone. But my wife Suzanne liked the security of having a dog digging up my railway, and so did my seven year old daughter. So, today, after four hours of exhaustive searching through the denizens of the pound, we found the New Terror. Fully half of the dogs in the pound were pit bulls, while another forty percent seemed to be Chihuahuas. Our new fellow isn’t either, being a tubby little twenty pounds of mutt.

He only towers thirty-five feet above the tracks. But he’s young, and likes to play ball, and I’ll just bet he’s a digger. It’s a blessing to get a dog now, at this stage of the construction, because he can dig stuff up and do relatively little harm. I’m just glad I laid my concrete last weekend and didn’t put it off!

Well, we reasoned, he’s only three, and he’s going to get bored. So, in our infinite wisdom, we acquired ANOTHER dog. You see, the second dog will keep the first one from getting bored, so he won’t WANT to dig up the tracks…I know, Gilligan logic. We pick up the new guy on Monday (he’s having a little work done in the downstairs hardware department).

Call me crazy, but I think this will work out. We can train the dogs to not dig up my railway while they’re still young. Of course they’re going to do it a couple of times at first, and that’s okay because there’s not much there to dig up.

So, tying it all together, we can now conclusively say that unless you believed that those Godzilla movies were real, garden railroading is “awfully authentic” instead of “real.” Unless some mad scientist creates a forty-foot tall dog – hey, it could happen!

But a track plan, in and of itself, is rather limited. It’s flat, and, even in my 3D SketchUp drawings, is uni-dimensional. What’s lacking is action (duh, it’s a plan,hello?). Not the action of trains moving around and crossing gates rising, but construction action. Looking at my plan, I see that there is no sequence of construction. I know I have this to do and that to do, but there is no order, no sequence, nothing that links my track plan to the chaotic mess that’s out there in the yard right now.

A plan without action is wasted time. Energy without direction is wasted energy. So energy applied to a plan without action is a waste of what, time and energy? Well, enough of that, then!

Track Plan Part II: Action Plan

Here’s where we start pulling ahead of the pack, separating our railway from the gazillion point ten track plans still on the shelf. We develop an action plan that complements our track plan.

Points of Action:
1. Pour concrete in China
2. Clear and restore/repair tracks in China
3. Build the road bridge in China
4. Replace Chinese railroad bridge
5. Design and plan Chinese building locations
6. Build and place Chinese structures
7. Landscape China
8. Replace Kazakhstani bridge
9. Restore rails from Kazakhstani through Paris
10. Design and build Kazakhstan
11. Design and build Ukraine
12. Design and build Paris

Now, a track plan without an action plan is wasted time. An action plan without a timeline is a busted dream (pretty good imagery, huh?). So, gulp, here goes:

1. Done
2. By July 15, ‘09
3. By Aug 15, ‘09
4. By Sep 15, ’09
5. By Oct 01, ‘09
6. That’s going to take some time. Since we’ve got the locations in place, it could take us six months before we have buildings we like. Hmmm…I’ll say Apr 15, ‘10
7. By Nov 01, ‘09
8. That’s another tall order. I imagine we’ll get to designing both bridges in the very near future. But that’s a long bridge, and we’ll be into the holidays. I’ll say Feb 15, ’10
9. By Jan 01, ‘10
10. Things are starting to bunch up, aren’t they? We’ve got the Chinese buildings in the works, the long Kazakhstani bridge in building, and now we’re adding to new scenery. I’ll say designed by Feb 01, ’10, but not completed until Jun 15, ’10.
11. The Ukraine will be more complex than Kazakhstan on account of I’m planning a railway stop there. I’ll stay with designed by Feb 01, ’10, but construction not done until Jun 15.
12. That leaves us the summer an d fall to build Paris. I’m really looking forward to the Parisian part of our trip…it will be the showcase. But Paris will be far more complex to build than China, and I’m afraid that if I start with Paris, I may become bogged down and never get to China. China, on the other hand, is relatively simple and will offer many rewards that will encourage me to continue to Paris. Ah hah!

So, there it is. We’ve accomplished quite a bit, haven’t we? We moved our track plan off the shelf by associating an action plan with it. And we’ve breathed existence into the action plan by pinning it to a timeline.

I am making light of it, of course, but the action plan/timeline combination is critically important to far more than just a dopey backyard railway. Plans without deadlines are just dreams that won’t come true, like making wishes in a mayonnaise jar.
Trying to accomplish anything meaningful is made doubly more difficult by attempting it without a plan. But having a plan is not enough – it needs to have an element of time, a start and stop component, to make it more meaningful than a wish in a mayonnaise jar.

And then, you have to do it…

Of course, in today’s exercise, I didn’t pour concrete as one pours milk, but rather blopped concrete by hand in specific locations. But it was just as rewarding, once I got past the idea that I was seriously screwing it up!

First things first: mixing your concrete. I filled a plastic bucket around ¼ full of water and then added Quikcrete Concrete mix with a garden shovel. I poured the concrete in with my left hand while agitating the mixture with my right. I wanted a thick, putty-like finish. Boy, was I surprised! Plaster of Paris sets up very quickly, even in the mixing bowl if you dawdle. Not so Mr. Concrete. I kept adding more and more powder, expecting it to thicken like plaster does. What you get in the concrete bucket is an ever deepening layer of sand and pebbles at the bottom of the water. There is no thickening, or any sign that you’ve done anything beyond get the powder wet.

The secret of mixing, then, is to make absolutely sure you completely integrate the sand and water together, so that there are no clumps. Clumps, when poured into your final location, will result in dry, non-adhesive pockets of powder.

Now, this area to which I applied concrete was 1910 eastern rural China, not big on paved streets and parking lots. So, instead of squaring off my landscaping with wooden borders and pouring the concrete in, I chose to place it by the handful. The advantages are that you get a thinner finished coat which dries faster, and you can control pretty carefully where the concrete goes. I tried to get it to flow between my rocks at the top of the ridge and down around the drain pipe in the lower level area above the tunnel.

The second secret of concrete is to buy more mix than you think you’ll need. I bought mine at Lowe’s for about three bucks. For two bucks, I could have gotten a ten pound bag, and I was sorely tempted. I figured it would be much easier to handle a ten pound bag than the three dollar sixty pounder. But I heard my wife’s voice asking “what are you, crazy?” when I realized I could get six times more mix for only fifty percent more money. Today I used at least thirty-five pounds of the mix! I laid a patch roughly eight inches wide by six feet long by about an inch deep, and it took two thirds of the bag. Had I gone with the flyweight bag, I would have been back at Lowe’s, covered in concrete powder, looking like a dope. Thank you, my wife!

In applying the concrete, there is a wet method and a dry method of application. The wet method is where you pour the concrete onto the ground directly from the bucket. All of the water goes with it, creating something of a soup with sand and gravel at the bottom. I chose the dry, using my hand to scoop goop out of the bucket and allowing the bulk of the water to drain back into the bucket before applying the concrete. The advantage is that you can place the wet mixture without much runoff. I chose this method because most of my landscape here is sloping, and I didn’t want the mixture to run. I planted a few “grabbers”, high profile rocks stuck into the ground around which the concrete can adhere, but not enough to hold a poured batch in place.

That’s the third secret of concrete: you want to plant stakes or pointy rocks or other objects, even holes in the ground, to provide a dimensional hold for your concrete. If you just pour it, the concrete simply sits on top of the ground with nothing to anchor it. These “grabbers” will keep your concrete stuck where you placed it.

I checked it about twenty minutes ago…it’s been sitting out there now for about ten hours. It still has that moist dark gray sheen, but it’s beginning to firm up!

Remember yesterday how I told you the story of the TV director that didn’t want to close his shoot in case he forgot something? Same thing happened to me today. I just didn’t want to clean up the concrete for fear I’d forgotten something. So I looked and looked and looked again to make sure I hadn’t concreted something I shouldn’t and hadn’t left anything uncovered. But, in the end, I hit it all.

Tomorrow’s light will reveal the value of the job I did. Goodness, we’re almost down to working on the rails!