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!

Part of the adventure in working on a garden railway is, well, the adventure of it all! You’re free to create, to build, to mastermind an empire! And, since we know Garden Railroading is Real Railroading, your empire exists in the real world. You are doing the real deal!

In our zeal to create cool stuff in the right scale, with the right look, and with that cool “oh wow” thing that makes garden railroading so amazing, we sometimes get just a wee bit ahead of ourselves.

Case in point: my conversion of the 1/28th scale Bachmann 4-6-0 locomotive into a 1/18th scale 4-4-0. I took the width from a set of drawings for a 1/24th scale baggage combine I got from Garden Railways Magazine and expanded up to 1/18th scale. I built the frame for the combine out of basswood, and, believe it or not, popsicle sticks. Using the width of the combine as a gauge, I widened the cab of the locomotive to match. Sure it looks a little funky, but, hey, it’s narrow gauge, it’s supposed to look funky!

Now, as you know, we’ve recently been rather busy building the platforms for those buildings in the Ukrainian Section. It was a great rush to grab a piece of plywood and whup it into a nifty looking railway platform. And, if I do say so myself, the new platform looks simply smashing.

Ah, but there’s the rub…literally. It seems when Captain Whizbang grabbed a piece of plywood, he didn’t think about clearance…

“Aye, clearance laddie,” croaks the Chief Engineer over his cigar,” ye didna’ think o’ the clearance, did ye?” He cackles softly. “Ye’ll not get far without ye dunna plan yer clearance!”

Well, whatever.

Interestingly enough, the story is true. The plywood foundation for the station in the Ukraine lies too close to the rails to allow my modified 1/18th locomotive, and therefore any cars of that same width, to pass without, how do you say it, frictive issues?

The real surprise came when I attempted to pass the cypress tree with my modified locomotive…towed by the New Bright 2-6-0 because the 4-4-0 doesn’t run yet. KEEEEERASH! Over she went. Stupid tree.

The real, real surprise came when we squeaked past the farmhouse and its even more ramshackle platform. Surprise! The locomotive cleared it with fractions of an inch to spare! I claim no genius, mind you, but I do blame simple dumb luck!

So, yes, the station platform looks great. I have about eight hours of labor into it. I can’t trim the front of the platform because I’ve already planked it. I can’t trim the back of the platform because I’ve already custom-fit it to the station buildings, and I would have to tear up planking to accommodate their new location. Plus, have you ever tried to “shave” ½ inch plywood? I’d sooner shave a porcupine!

“Ye’r an idiot,” mutters the Chief Engineer.

I checked the clearance of the wide locomotive through the temporary retaining walls, but not through the semi-permanent log walls in place now. Now I am concerned about that, too.

Perhaps this conversion to 1/18th thing needs a little more thought. Perhaps wider isn’t better on the garden railway. Perhaps one should plan a little bit before one invests eight hours of labor in a project. Perhaps.

“Perhaps ye’r an idiot,” says the Chief Engineer as he claps on his cap and leaves.

Perhaps.

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!!!

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!

No matter how carefully you plan youi always find something you had missed. I was so concerned about getting that mountain sculpted in 3D and that concrete poured I forgot about a critical element: electricity.

The motive power (with a nod to Ayn Rand) on the Paris to Shanghai Railway will be of the battery driven variety. I like the independence of the locomotives and frankly can’t afford DCC. There’s a great idea in Kalmbach’s Garden Railways Tips & Tricks for your garden railway(it comes as part of your subscription to Garden Railways Magazine (www.trains.com)) about adapting remote controls from cheap RC cars to run trains that I thought was quite worthwhile. I’ll let you know how it works out as soon as I get to that part of the adventure.

We can avoid transformer issues by not having to electrify the rails, which will make wiring simpler. Another trick (or is it a tip?) in the Kalmbach book is to raid miniature Christmas light sets for bulbs. I’m wondering why we should stop at just bulbs. I’m thinking we should go all out, sockets and all. Running my city lights down conventional AC power cords will be inexpensive and robust at the same time. And, like the DC transformer we have avoided by going AC, we can dim the lights using simple AC dimmers. Here’s the pun: brilliant thinking!

My plan is to raid the 99¢ Store for 35-bulb light sets and extension cords. Simple PVC pipe of the black sewer variety can serve as conduit, and will run through the landscaping at the edge of the roadbed. I can run it under the road bridge in the China section, effectively crossing the track with power.

I’m terribly tempted to run the wires above ground on power poles along the right of way. It would look like telegraph lines. But we’ve acquired two canine-based railway destruction units, and I’m certain an overhead wiring system would provide an irresistible target. And, you’re talking AC, the real deal, not some wimpy DC power pack. Cross those lines and you could have a shocking experience! (Well, of course I’ll plug it into a GFI, but you shouldn’t take chances!)

I imagine you can cut sockets out of the Christmas light set to reduce the number of lights on a strand…it will be nice to have lights in my Chinese railroad station, but not 35 of ‘em! The nice thing about 99¢ light sets is that you can experiment heavily on the cheap.

Each building will get its own light set, and will connect to extension cords cut and wired end-to-end to run down the conduit. The light-set-to-extension-cord-head junction will occur in a cleverly landscaped styrene box. That way the connection will be available but hidden.

All of this clever disguising in the landscape will only be required in China, where electrical wires would seem out of place in 1910. China is the part of the railway most exposed to canine intrusion, too. When we get to Paris, I believe we’ll see lots of exposed wire. Turn of the 20th Century cities flirted with electricity so strongly that they didn’t worry about the aesthetics of exposed wires.

So, the plans change again! I do believe we’ll begin planting plants in the next day or so. Dog number two (he has no name yet except #14, as that was his cage number at the pound) is arriving tomorrow, providing his surgery went okay today. But Tuesday, maybe Wednesday, we’ll be picking up the ground cover to secure my hillsides.

I’ve been thinking a lot about bridges lately. The China Station end of my garden railway requires three of them, and they are puzzling in the extreme.

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!