Poolside Rails

The China Mountain is Finally Planted!

What’s the first thing you know about garden railroading? Well, it takes place in a garden! That’s why they call it that!  Until this weekend we’ve been Brown Dirt Railroading…not much fun!
“I say, Brown Dirt Railroading,” sniffs the CEO. “I don’t quite get it.”

“It’s a joke,” the CFO mutters drily over his brandy. “It’s emphasizing the fact that we haven’t planted anything in the garden.”

“Well I’m not certain I get it,” the CEO coughs slightly and cleans his glasses on his napkin.

“That don’t surprise me much,” chuckles the Chief Engineer. “The  only thing I’ve ever seen you get is drunk!”

“Oh, now see here…” the CEO is flustered.

“Gentlemen,” the secretary interjects “…the narrative.”

All go silent again.

Yes, on a whim and a prayer my darling wife, the very love of my life, the Maintenance Operations Manager (or MOM, as my daughter calls her),  planted plants over the China Mountain. Now, for the very first time, the China Section is planted!

The plants, for those of you who know plants, are of the Creeping Charlie variety. They’re green, have leaves, and, well they’re there, in the garden, so to speak. Horticulture was never my subject.

Now, planting plants in the middle of existing trackage is clearly a little difficult, as the  pictures will attest.  Getting the various elements of planting to the planting zone itself was obviously a challenge; dirt appears to have gone everywhere, and water was imported from a hose rather than a judicious little watering can. But I don’t care! I’ve got Plants!

And some of the landscape features that marked the China Section have changed just a little bit. Little features like the road, which when buried by the Wonder Dog (I wonder what he’ll destroy next?) tended to disappear, must have looked like prime planting ground. And gone is the little flat spot I had cleaved (cloven?) out of the China Mountain for the quaint Chinese cottage which had, again, been modified by Mr. Zorro to the point where it just looked like a ducky place to plant a plant.  But I don’t care! I’ve got plants!

And that tunnel we so carefully blasted underneath the roadbed so that the now disappeared road could continue offstage…well, that’s filled with dirt now, and looks more like a cave.  But I don’t care! I’ve got plants!

The Tunnel Appears Plugged!

I’m joking, of course. It’s a wonderful thing MOM did by planting all that greenery, and suddenly the China Section has character. Actually, the China Section at the moment is under a web of Anti-Wonder Dog Netting. My wife and I agree that Mr. Zorro would have a field day in our field of green, digging and rooting and just having too much fun!

Anti-Wonder Dog Netting

“I can’t tell,” says the CEO. “Is he happy or not?”

“He’s groompy, ye windbag,” said the Chief Engineer. Stout number five is just finishing up, and the Chief Engineer tends to forget his manners.  “He’s a groompy sourpuss today.”

“Let’s not print that,” says the PR Guy. “That’s bad press.”

Yes, I am a little grumpy, but I am DELIGHTED to have greens in my garden. It feels so…gardeny!  It’ll take some time for the little suckers to get a hold, and there will be watering and all that stuff. But soon, my friend, soon you’ll see a garden in our garden railway!

Now, on the HO pike in your basement, you get your white glue and your little piece of lichen and, boom, you’ve got a plant. But garden railroading is real railroading, and, in this case, is real gardening! There’s watering and weeding and trimming that has to be done. I’m not sure how the rails will hold up to all of that. The dirt can be swept away…it’s the mud I’m worried about…there’s going to be mud.

We’re down operationally until the Anti-Wonder Dog netting is removed, but that’s okay. Between the Bachmann Not-So-Big Hauler, the damage to the Piko station platform, and stringing of electric wires, I’ve got plenty more railroading to do than just run trains!

But soon I’ll be able to run ‘em through a GARDEN!

You saw in yesterday’s post that I’ve come up with a nice little set of landscaping plans for the China section.

That started me thinking about plans in general. I’m a fan of plans, really. A good plan is worth its weight in gold when it’s practicable…you can draw up the most exquisite plans in the world, but they are useless if they cannot be put into action.

What’s been drifting around in my head has been the plan for the control panel on the Paris to Peking Garden Railway (if you’re watching, you’ll notice I just squeezed in a key word, there). The design needs to be both complete and something I can build.

The panel will need to deal with track power, broken into zones, with the two turnouts, and with the structure and streetlight systems. For the sake of simplicity, I’ve decided to put all streetlights on one circuit and all structure lights on another. As you’ll recall, we’re stringing our wires overhead to the Nexus points (I think the plural is nexi, but that’s just too darned esoteric of a word!) in each section. Putting the two lighting systems on common circuits will mean only four wires on the poles…prototypical and easy to repair when The Wonder Dog strikes!

So, this is the plan for the panel. The transformer is fit into a recess on top of the panel for breathing space and ease of access.

Ah, access: the magic word for model railroaders the world over. How to provide access? In this case the question is where to provide it…where does the control panel go?

The main AC supply is in Paris (are you surprised?), which means the panel should go up there. Paris, city of lights even in 1910, will look just fine with wires traveling along some sort of bridge to get outside the rails. I’m sure this is how they do it in real life!

The panel will have its own little stand, independent of but wired to the railroad, and I’m thinking it will go right about where that big fern is now. The Maintenance Operations Manager and I have had a discussion about said fern, and all parties agree it is time to move.

I know what you’re thinking – what about the other side of the panel? Where’s the wiring diagram to make the switches work? Well, Slim, you got me there. I reckon to install the switches and then figure out how to wire ‘em – I’m not so good with thinking my way through wiring on paper. Just tellin’ you the truth, there…

The panel and its attendant stand can be built out of the junk plywo…I mean “extra” plywood I happen to have on hand as the mysterious dumpster has not yet arrived. Man! I’ve got to get working on that plywood…I have a gazillion things designed and that dumpster could show up any day!

*****

Now, I don’t normally do this, and I promise not to do it on anything except extremely important occasions, but this is one of those, so here goes:

You know how I was joking the other day about how the word “China” goes great in front of all kinds of things. I learned yesterday about an 11 year old girl named China. She’s the daughter of a friend at work. The daughter called her mom from school yesterday because she’d been hit in the face by a tennis ball. The mom, my friend, told China to wait the 25 minutes for her father to come and pick her up.

I asked my friend how China was today and she started to cry. China didn’t get hit by a tennis ball but by a tether ball intentionally whacked to hurt her. It hit her on the side of the head so hard it caused internal bleeding in her eye socket, and knocked the retina loose from her right eye. At this very moment she’s lost the sight in that eye, and the doctors don’t know if she’ll get it back.

I don’t know if you’re the religious sort, but, tonight, before you turn out the lights, could you please say a little prayer for China and her family? She’s just a kid, and I know she’s terribly scared. Your prayer would help. Thanks.

It’s no secret that I have a black thumb. I actually killed a geranium plant, and you’re not supposed to be able to kill those. In fact, it was the death of that fine looking geranium that got me banned from any manner of plant pruning here at the Turner house. My wife glares at me when I pick up the hedge clippers.

“Where are you going with those?”

“Just to trim some bushes…”

“Uh huh. Let me do that for you.”

That’s the reason I haven’t planted plants along the top of the China Mountain: clipper shock.

I was discussing the lack of plantage along the top of the hill with the Maintenance Operations Manager, or MOM, as my daughter calls her, just the other day. She suggested two things that I thought were terrific ideas.

The first was to draft up a landscaping plan to give her an idea of what to plant where. I drew my plan in MS Paint because I’m absolutely terrible at drawing curves in real life. Well, that and I’m lazy. The plan shows the shape of the China Loop with reasonable accuracy, and, when compared with the topography, should make it rather clear what to plant where.

I must point out that the word China goes really good in front of almost anything. You’ve got your China plates, of course, but here on the Paris to Peking Railway we have the China Section, the China House, the China Bridge, the Western China Turnout (I’m particularly fond of that one), the China Mountain, and the China Loop. West of the China Bridge is that much larger mountain which we shall call Magic Mountain just for giggles and grins. Anyway, things just sound more official and mysterious with the word China in front of them. I have yet to call myself China Bill, but I’m thinking about it!

Idea number two is rather novel, but it makes a lot of sense. As you know, Zorro the Wonder Dog (we wonder what he’s going to wreck next) is a major nuisance down there in the China Section (see what I mean about that China thing? Sounds cool, huh?). He’s not a digger, as I’d feared, but a jumper. His favorite place to jump is right up there to the top of the China Mountain. I had hoped that planting the Mountain would discourage him, but my wife doesn’t think so.

Her suggestion is to build a curving screen that is perhaps three feet high that fits around the outside brickwork of the China Loop. Such a screen will discourage Wonder Dog from jumping over it. He will, of course, find a way to scale Magic Mountain, but we can at least ease the pressure on the China Mountain.

My idea…I’m particularly brilliant at these things, you know…was to cut the screen in the shapes of trees. Painted a nice forest green, perhaps with detailing, the screen would provide a nice view break when seen from the railroad side, and give the shorter viewer the illusion of looking through a forest when seen from the outside. I drafted a very, very rough plan in MS Paint just to give you an idea of what we’re talking about. Pretty cool, huh? The screen will be movable to provide access to the railway, but will spend most of its days in place around the curve. I think it’s an excellent idea. And my rendering of it is, of course, brilliant.

So, what have we got? Well, now we have a landscaping plan. Maybe, with plan in hand, we’ll see some plants actually hit the ground this weekend. Maybe.

And, as the fabled dumpster has not yet arrived, I have a supply of plywood, although it’s naily, nasty stuff with a gazillion splinters. A quick cut with the jigsaw of death, a little sandpaper, a nice heavy coat of Rust-Oleum Forest Green, and, voila, an innovative Wonder-Dog-Blocker. Oh yeah, it has to be curved. Well, back to the drawing board!

As you know, I take Friday and Saturday nights off to recharge the batteries and spend some time with the fam. Well, the fam is out this evening, and I felt bad about not providing you with the much promised and oft bally-hooed picture of “the rock”…now you have it. There you go. Enjoy.

Whilst a’shootin’ pictures along the China Curve, I espied two other very, very good signs.

First is that fellow looking wistfully across the pool. I did not place that fellow there. I believe it to be the work of my little girl. That’s a good sign, as it shows she’s playing with the garden railway on her own!

The other good sign are those green plants there on top of the mountain. I did not place those plants there. I believe it to be the work of my lovely wife…I mean the Landscaping Director, er, manager, er you know, my wife. That’s a very good sign.

I do believe we shall see landscaping this weekend after all. Hoo-Rah!

Anyway, this is not a post. I never wrote this, you certainly didn’t see it. We’ll just keep it to ourselves and on one will know, okay? Okay. Thanks!

And who keeps messing with sun? Every day I come home from my 43 mile commute it seems like the darned thing is lower in the sky…weird. Next thing you know they’ll be messing with the clocks! Me? Paranoid? Who said that?

The CEO chokes on his cigar.

“What?!? What did you say? Rocks?”

“Aye,” the Chief Engineer squints over his pint. All of the other board members of the Paris to Peking Railway prefer to drink the CEO’s brandy at these meetings, but the Chief Engineer likes his pint of stout.

“Aye, ’tis rocks I said, and I dunna mean the ones a’tween yer ears!”

The Chief Engineer gets feisty when he drinks stout. Fortunately, the CEO gets forgiving when he drinks his brandy. It’s the secret to the survival of the railway company.

“Bu-bu-but we just tore those rocks up!”

I’ve been trying to find a balance between suitable landscaping materials and overall resistance to stupid dog attacks on the China Curve.

I tried a piddly little craft stick retaining wall (that idea, by the by, is fully explained, perhaps a little more thoroughly than I did it, in the current issue of Garden Railways Magazine…how I wish I’d written that article!). That wall disappeared on day two. I tried honest-to-Pete wooden logs…Kapow! Over they went.

“I canna stand it!” Wails the Chief Engineer. He tends to get weepy on his fourth stout.

The decision was made last week to stake the logs into the ground using inexpensive wooden wedges from Lowe’s, already in hand, thrust through holes drilled into the logs. Here’s a little secret about yours truly: I’m not just cheap…I’m lazy!

I was looking around for the right material that was both on hand and landscape oriented…thinking about a cut…what material have I seen lining a cut…what do they most often cut through? Rock, duh!

Rock is heavy and quite bug-proof: let us not forget that Garden Railroading is Real Roading. Not only that, but I seem to have grown an abundance of rocks in my backyard!

So I placed one just to see how it looked. The key lies in choosing a rough but natural looking stone. Most of my rocks are bits of broken concrete.

Now, personally, I find little piecces of concrete vaguely depressing. They are chunks of what once was. When I was a little kid we had an incinerator in our backyard. I think my dad knocked it over when it became illegal to have those things in LA County. I clearly remember making forts for my army men out of the broken concrete pieces of those things, with the big ol’ hunkin’ shafts of rusted reinforcement wire hanging out of ‘em and everything. I find it depressing (honest, doc, I don’t hate my mom!). So, concrete is right out.

Anyway, that rock looks really nice right there along the railway. I don’t know why I didn’t think of rock before…it seems so, so, natural! I took a picture of it…at least I thought I did, but now, at ten o’clock at night, I rifle my hard drives and camera drives and don’t have one! Instead I substituted that cool picture of the Station Fire, the one that is burning north of LA right now, that I shot on Sunday from the Griffith Park Observatory. I’m not a scenic picture guy, but, come on, you have to admit that is one cool picture! That’s about 200 square miles of fire making that cloud…on Monday the fire actually condensed the moisture in the air to make cumulus clouds. That is one big fire! I heard today it’s the largest in California’s history.

Back to the Railway: I have a solemn promise out of my wife- I mean the Chief Landscaping Engineering Manager-that we are GOING TO PLANT this weekend. Picture this; nice green plants that annoy the idiot growing nicely, waving in the sun along the top of the hill high above a stout, authentic looking, aesthetically pleasing palisade of China-appropriate rock. What do you think? Cool, huh?

The Chief Engineer socks the PR Guy a good one in the belly. He gets feisty on the fifth pint. The meeting is over.

Housekeeping rules: Friday nights are off, so no post tomorrow. The wife, little girl, and I went to see Ponyo a couple of weeks ago. Although not up to Miyazaki’s highest measure, it is nonetheless a very pleasant film. If you have little ones, it’s not a bad choice. You can find a review I wrote on it at www.cinemaroll.com by searching on Ponyo, and yes, that is a shameless plug. Sorry, but it’s what I do on my days off!

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Progress is coming along nicely on the locomotive conversion. I have the cab windows blocked in with sheet styrene. I have the forward windows cut and the left windows marked for cutting.

“So,” coughs the CEO of the Paris to Peking Railway, “how are things on the railway?”

The Chief Engineer hangs his head and doesn’t reply.

“Well,” the PR Guy fidgets with his brandy snifter, “it’s like this. We were all gung ho about the locomotive conversion…”

“…and the station buildings,” the Chief Engineer interjects without looking up.

“…and the station buildings, and sorting out the wiring on the Parisian Curve…”

“…and planking those platforms and filling up the ruddy swimmin’ pool,” the Chief Engineer prounces the word pool “pyool”, causing a brief smile on the face of the CEO, who has a fondness for his Scottish friend.

“…and, well, we just sort of forgot about the China Section…” The PR guy’s voice trails off.
“FORGOT?” The CEO roars, “FORGOT?!? HOW on God’s Green Earth could ANYONE FORGET about a railway?”

“Just for the record,” mutters the CFO, softly, “this did happen at least once before…”
The boardroom erupts in pandemonium.

It’s true. Between the various building projects and the new job, I simply haven’t had the time to visit the China Section.

What a mess! The Terror, the Idiot, Zorro the Maniac, has completely buried the rails in the China Section! I blame the dog, of course, but I blame myself, too. I haven’t pushed the Landscaping Manager hard enough on getting that hill protected.

“Aye,” the Chief Engineer raises his head, “do ya no ken that landscaping equals protet-yun from yon wee small doggy?”

Yes, well, whatever he said. Until we get that mountain in the China Section planted the bare dirt is like a magnet for that canine monster.

I had this quasi-brilliant idea this afternoon…did I mention it’s hot? It’s like a gazillion degrees out there right now, and the sun is down!…anyway, the idea was to drill holes through the logs I’m using as retaining walls and stake them into the ground. I know, I know, if you’ve ever seen anyone use railroad ties in their backyard you know that they most often stake them down. But give me a break, I thought of this all by myself, and I’m not a landscaper, and I don’t have any real railroad ties in my backyard!

So, that’s the new plan. Forget about gay Paree for the moment and get our trowel and brushes back to the China Section post haste that we might restore some degree of operations down there. The weekend is just ahead…perhaps I can persuade the Landscape Manager that THIS is the weekend to plant, now that all the digging has been done for us!

Mind you, I’d plant the mountain myself, but this is the joint part of the process…you know, if everyone does a part of the job, everyone has buy in. My little girl has decorated the station, although she’s already off to something new. If my wonderful wife has a hand in planting the mountain perhaps her interest will grow, too.

I can only tell you this: the Idiot shows far more interest in the railroad than any of us!

“Say,” pipes up the PR guy. “Do any of you guys know the difference between pea soup and roast beef?”

“I dunna ken,” responds the Chief Engineer, expecting the worst.

“Duh, anyone can roast beef!” the PR guy roars. The room explodes in gales of laughter.

“See here,” the CEO sighs, wiping the tears from his eyes, “meeting adjourned!”

Well, it was bound to happen. As you know, last Sunday was Wyatt Exposition Day on the Paris to Peking Railway. Things went swimmingly except for the various disasters previously noted. The railroad looked great, the New Bright 2-6-0 actually traveled through the entire China Curve without leaving the track or stalling, and Wyatt had a great time.

That was Sunday. I’ve now been at my new job for three days, leaving the house at 6:45 AM and getting home at 6:00 PM. The dogs have been excited to see me. Last night my wife told me she didn’t think the railway was going to make it. It’s getting buried by the dogs.

“Gillmore’s all right,” she said. Gillmore is the white corgi mix that puts the “good” in good dog. “It’s that other one…”

The “other one” is an Aussie shepherd/cocker spaniel mix. He’s ten months old. His official name is Zorro, but we generally refer to him as “the idiot”.

The board of directors on the P-to-P Ry refer to him as “the Terror.”

“Look at my retaining walls!” wails the Chief Engineer.

“Perhaps we could serve him with a restraining order,” suggests the CFO.

“How about we serve him with a leash?” jokes the PR guy.

“I’d rather serve him with a side of fries!” yells the Chief Engineer.

Eyebrows raise around the room.

The problem is in the landscaping of the China Section: there isn’t any. Zorro needs access to the fence that borders the south side of the China Section in order to bark at cars, at bicycles, at passers by on the sidewalk, and at things only he can see…even Gillmore doesn’t see ‘em! Zorro thunders over the China Mountain like TR up San Juan Hill!

If we can get the mountain planted, we can accomplish three things at once; we can beautify the mountain, we can anchor the loose dirt, and we can dissuade young Mr. Zorro from using the mountain as his personal launch pad, as he’ll be reticent to rumble through the plants. That’s the theory, anyway.

“Brilliant!” roars the CEO.

“Excellent plan!” thunders the Chief Engineer.

“Who’ll pay for the plants?” queries the CFO.

The room falls silent.

“Well”, my wife begins, softly, “I do have some clippings of Wandering Jew that would do nicely up there. “That’s at no cost.”

“Bully!” applauds the CFO.

“‘at’s perfect!” thunders the Chief Engineer.

“It’s out of scale,” the PR guy says, quietly.

“DONE!” roars the CEO. “Do it this weekend. Meeting adjourned!”

Cigars are stubbed out, plush red leather chairs scrape across the floor as they’re shoved under the table, and the boardroom is suddenly quiet.

“That was easy,” my wife says as she picks the empty brandy snifters and ashtrays.

Garden Railroading is Real Railroading, complete with the need to guard against natural disasters. Real railroads have earthquakes and typhoons and other major events. Here on the Paris to Peking Railway, we have our own special natural disaster: the Terror!

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.

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!

As you’ll recall, I cut my LGB/Pola in half along the roof’s ridgeline in order to make two half buildings out of it.

My plan is both devious and simple at the same time. As we’ve opted for the track-powered LGB locomotive (see Electrification Consideration for the juicy details), my presentation on the Wyatt Day Exhibition will be rather short. To fill the potential interest gap in the four-year-old Wyatt’s itenerary, I’ve opted to include some “play value” scenery. If you can’t blind ‘em with your brilliance, dazzle ‘em with your BS!

Now, my seven-year-old daughter has been a silent witness to this subtle subterfuge, not knowing that I am pulling the old switcheroo on the little brother of one of her best friends. She has, in fact, watched the architectural surgery with both interest and enthusiasm.

That was all yesterday. Today I knew I had to clean up the piece of plywood I threw under the two halfway houses to keep them stable. Indeed. This morning I found my two story structure destroyed, having been dashed to the ground by what must have been a strong gust of wind (perhaps of the canine variety).

My littlest girl watched in anticipation as I reassembled my shattered domiciles. By the way, I tried out the look of a three story station: it’s too much, looking overwhelmingly big-bad idea. She kept asking me when she could decorate. By decorate, I thought she meant painting the buildings. I have to tell you, never hire a seven-year-old to paint your house, even in 1/18th scale.

“When I’ve got the second floor done,” I kept telling her.

Cutting a piece of plywood to serve as the second floor was surprisingly difficult. Perhaps my motto Measure Once, Cut Twice doesn’t serve me well. I eventually cut three second floors, although I only needed one. But I was able to use the other two second floors as first floors, and my little cutting adventure shall remain our little secret. I meant to do that!

I drilled a hole in the plywood base through which I stuck a two-inch long brass screw. I fixed the screw to the plywood by using a nut, countersunk into the wood so as not to rise above it. Then I drilled a hole in the bottom of the corresponding wall on the structure. The building slips down over the screw, making it virtually windproof. I installed another such assembly on other end wall…the building is removable but very stable. I did the same thing for the smaller structure.

Finally, my very patient little girl was able to decorate. Out came the Disney Princesses and the Polly Pockets figures, along with all their various pieces of electric pink plastic furniture. To my deep and immediately relief, she had in mind “interior decorating”…”you know,” she said, “with furniture and stuff!” Not a paint brush in sight.

It turns out I was correct about that play value thing. I chopped up another house…a 1/18th scale shattered farm house from a line of military figures that my stepson gave it to me some years ago, and I haven’t found a use for it until today. Cutting off the “shattered” pieces and rearranging them makes for a complete, albeit somewhat small, non-shattered structure. In this case, I only had enough material to make two complete walls, so I placed the building in a corner.

So, you see, it’s important to have little eyes look upon your empire. They give you insight, help refresh your vision, and remind you of what is important. Most of all, though, they can help you decorate!