Poolside Rails

Remember that story about the grasshopper and the ant? You know, the ant works his keester off while the grasshopper goofs around, hopping over grass. Then the winter comes, and the grasshopper needs shoes or something like that. I forget how it goes. Really, who cares?

Anyway, the point is that winter has descended on the Paris to Peking Railway.  Mind you, winter in Southern California isn’t quite like winter in Nebraska or Maine, but it does pose challenges to us garden railroaders.  Rains fall, winds blow, and the days are shorter and colder. And the mud flows.

I ran the Bachmann Not-So-Big Hauler 4-4-0 Tank locomotive…I know what you’re thinking: it runs? Yep. It runs pretty good. Well, that’s an overstatement.  Fact is, the darn thing wheezes and squeaks more like an army tank than a precision piece of engineering. I think the problem is that some idiot spray painted the running gear black and hasn’t lubed a darn thing.

Anyway, the point is that I ran the Bachmann NSBH across the strikingly unrealistic bridge in the China Section…fortunately, the bridge is finally starting to fall apart. There’s a great article in this month’s Garden Railroading Magazine about building a bridge out of Styrofoam by stacking up layers of foam – ninety degrees different than how I built my people bridge. As soon as I get my nerve up, some blue foam, and a bunch of free weekend hours, I’m going to replace that cruddy wooden trestle that spans a scale 108 foot gap with no center support and is alive with termites.

Anyway, the point is that I got the Bachmann NSBH across the bridge and around the first leg of the China Curve when the thing threw itself off the rails. Now, it was dark, and I was pushing the two LGB passenger cars directly rather than through the couplers because I hadn’t yet  replaced the coupler on the NSBH.

By the way, the Bachmann NSBH coupler replacement was a piece of cake. I had an extra hoop from a different piece of rolling stock. Now, this sounds really stupid, but I built a hutch for my eight year olds’ 4H rabbit project: well, actually the project’s name is Gersham and he’s a lop, or slop, or something like that.  That hutch took up all of my nut and bolt sets. When I finally got around to replacing the coupler, I had no nut/bolt combo with which to accomplish the task.  Instead I connected some cotter pins together to hold the hoop in place. It seems to work.

Anyway, the point is that the track down there in the China Section has lifted off the roadbed due to an insidious flow of mud from the recently planted China Hill.  It was a mountain for awhile, but the landscaping effort reduced the lofty heights down to knollish lumps.

When the sun came up on Sunday, after we’d taken the dogs for a hike along the Goleta Slough and I’d run out of nuts on the hutch and it was now late in the afternoon, I decided to take a gander at my China Curve. I believe these pictures rather tell the story.  Next Saturday, or probably Sunday, or possibly the weekend after, I’ll get the hose out and clear the floe, reseat the track, and figure out some degree of a retaining wall.

But it’ll be tough, because it rains, the mud flows, and it gets dark early.  That’s winter for you! There! That’s the point!

When I had my HO roundy round in the basement, I was the master of the universe.  I had control over lights, over sound…even electricity flowed only at my command.  Want to take a picture? Turn on the lights over here, over there, light up the structures…2 in the afternoon or 2 in the morning, it didn’t matter.

As you may have heard, Garden Railroading is Real Railroading. The sun is pretty hard to simulate without a bunch of expensive equipment. And, as you may also have heard, I’m cheap.

My backyard has a nice patio on the northwest corner of the house, a nice little side yard that runs on the southwest side, and a swimming pool in between. The Paris to Peking Railway runs on the west side of the pool.

There’s a gate that separates the pool from the patio on the north and another that separates the side yard on the south.  My wife has been testing the theory that the dogs will be willing to stay on the patio if we close the patio gate. But the dogs can go through the gate, so she’s been sliding heavy potted plants across the gate.  I’ve been working on the railroad today, and ran rather late, and so had the gate open.

What I had in mind was a really nice evening shot of the railway, with the little lights on and the Bachmann Not-So-Big Hauler locomotive in front of the station, all lit up with the nice blue of the falling evening. With my hands full of locomotive and power pack I leave the house, cross the patio, and find it’s blocked because in the time it took me to go get the camera and put it in my pocket and pick up the locomotive my wife had closed the gate and slid the plants across it. And she’d turned on the garden hose to water the plants.

So I went through the house…each of my daughters has a door that opens into the backyard. My older daughter’s opens right onto the pool, but she’s “in a mood”, so that door was off limits. Instead I had to go all the way through the house, out my younger daughter’s door, through the side yard, and around the pool to get the locomotive on the rails and the power supply plugged in.

But there’s a GFI hooked up somewhere on the power line that supplies the outlet for the garden railway, and it was popped. So I had to go and find the outlet that had the tripped GFI. I remembered that I built a nifty little shed at one corner of the house in which I place my railway hardware…Mr. Wizard seemed to have built the shed directly over the outlet with the GFI. I had to go around the pool, down the side yard, through my little girl’s room, through the house, across the patio, and, black widows and brown recluses be damned, reach up into the dark corner of that shed and fumble around in the dark until I could push the little red button in the middle of the outlet.

I traveled the three hundred mile route back out to the pool and plugged in the power pack. I hooked the quasi-mangled overhead wires to the power pack…nothing happened. Is it the GFI? Is it the Power Pack? Is it the overhead wiring?  It took a moment, but I found that the overhead wiring wasn’t connected at the station platform. Blink, on came the lights!

I pointed my Blackberry at the scene…little green flashing light on the Blackberry? What? Low battery?

Another three hundred miles into the garage to find the charger for the Blackberry, trekked that thing all the way through the house, now losing enthusiasm for what is fast becoming a night shot, when, in the hallway, I see my older daughter’s door open…Ah Hah! I cut through her room, eliminating what seems like a half an hour from the walk through my little girl’s room and down the now dark side yard.

Plugged everything in, got my shots, relaxed for a moment and enjoyed the little lights twinkling on the pool. This is, after all, what model railroading is about. Wait a minute…that’s the wrong pool!

While I’m taking pictures my wife’s watering of the potted plants has run over the pots and is flooding the pool deck because the drain must be plugged! I can’t reach the plugs for the power pack and the cell phone charger without standing in a two inch deep puddle!

So, instead of enjoying the sparkly lights on the pool, I’m getting the garden hose and fishing it through the deepening water before it dumps itself into the pool to find the drain. I find it, shove the garden hose down it to get it clear, and am ultimately successful…the water gurgles down to a little whirlpool. Phew.

Now, I’m not complaining. There are plenty, plenty of people who don’t have it as good as I do, and I am thankful for every blessing I’ve been given.

But there are times when circumstances rather stack up to take the magic out of the moment. When you look at these pictures, therefore, imagine them lighter, and you’ll see what I hand in mind!

After a lot of researching and head-scratching, we have finally struck upon the answer of how the return switches were wired by the previous administration!

“I’m sorry, but what did he say? He lost me at that vulgar ‘head-scratching’ thing,” mutters the CEO, taking a sip on his brandy.

“We’ll be sure to leave that head-scratching part out when we report it to the papers. It sounds like a reference to lice,” replies the PR Guy, quickly taking notes.

“When you chuckle-heads arre quite thrrough,” rumbles the Chief Engineer over his stout, “I believe this is crrit-ickle information!”

Many months ago, back when I was philosophizing about ways to overcome the polarity issues, I had joked that maybe the way to accomplish it was to simply hardwire the turnouts so that trains can only go one way through them.

The problem, you see, is that the Paris to Peking Railway is a long dogbone-style layout. The train starts in Paris, passes through the Paris Turnout and heads south on the main line through the Ukraine and crosses a bridge at Kazakhstan, then passes through a second turnout, this one in China. The China Turnout sends the train around the China Section, which is really just an oblong loop. At the end of the loop the train comes back through the China Turnout again before heading north toward Paris. The Paris Turnout sends the train around the Parisian Loop before admitting it back onto the main line for its southern journey. You get the drift?

Heading south, the right rail on the main line is, for giggles and grins, the positive rail. If we head straight through the China Turnout, the right rail remains positive all the way around the China Bend until we approach the same China Turnout from the other side. The China Turnout admits the train back onto the main line in the opposite direction. The right rail should be positive, but now we’re heading north, and  that rail was negative when we were heading south. See the problem?

The way to fix the problem is to have a switchlike doohickey that flips the polarity on the main line based on the location of the train. LGB makes just such a doohickey.  It senses the presence of a train passing over it and flips the main line polarity. If you had two such doohickies, you could, in fact, complete a loop without touching the polarity on the main line yourself.

Well, after some digging around, it turns out that the previous administration had mounted exactly two such doohickies on the Paris to Peking main line, about a foot inside either loop from the turnouts.  These guys are LGB 1015 K and U units, and the switches are mounted on the main line inside the loops, while the sensors are mounted on the other part of the wye in turnout.

To make ‘em work, however, the train must always travel down the wye of the turnout to trip the sensor. A train traveling through the turnout on the main line passes  the doohickey but not the sensor, so that when it travels down the wye and through the turnout, the main line is set in the wrong polarity.

So, that’s great news!  The LGB engine is now officially able to make a circumnavigational journey of the Paris to Peking Railway!

That is, of course, when I finally get my hands on some straight rails for the Paris Loop.

“I’m not sure I understand all this polarity jibber jabber,” says the CEO after his fourth brandy.

“You dunna need to,” says the Chief Engineer. “’at’s my job.”

“All we need to know is that track electrification issues have all been solved,” says the CFO. “Now, if we can just get more track!

Well, my wife is mad at me because I spent a little too long on the garden railway. I swear, though, it was only because she was working on a project which delayed us from going to Lowe’s to pick up the stuff I needed for the projects I was supposed to be working on. And while I was working on the railway I also opened up and bleached the pool filter…that’s gotta count for something!

So, the Ukrainian Section lights up at night! Two streetlights, one on either end of the station platform, and another light inside the station and one more mysteriously shining from the windows of the farmhouse away down the tracks make the nighttime railway all twinkly and stuff.

Here’s the killer: I didn’t spend a penny. As you’ll recall from previous posts, I stole an idea from Kalmbach’s Tips & Tricks for your garden railway supplement. The idea was to use bulbs and sockets from miniature Christmas light sets as lights for the garden railway. After some trial and error I found some success with them. Kalmbach is right…they work great!

The deal is that miniature Christmas light sets are wired in series – if one burns out the rest go out, too. Modern sets have an additional wire that defeat that problem, but the sets are still wired in series. I was freaked out about that when I started this project. My freaking out increased when I wired just one light bulb directly to the plug of the light set all by itself and plugged it in.

ZZZZZ-POP!

That was the brightest I’ve ever seen one of those miniature light bulbs go…in the half second of its flaming death. It seems that my freaking out was entirely unnecessary. They’re just light sockets and bulbs after all. Two wires, nothing more.

Last week I built that cool streetlight and accidently wired it to the AC terminal of my LGB powerpack (not the DC terminal as previously reported…AC, DC, what’s the diff?). I built another streetlight and tested it on the AC terminal while the first streetlight was working…both worked just fine. Knowing that I could wire two bulbs directly to the AC terminal gave me this wicked idea…what if I had a power distribution system that would provide direct power to all bulbs equally? I think that’s called parallel wiring.

I drove two long wood screws into the underside of the station platform with the intention of using them as terminal posts for the two streetlights. I wrapped the lead wires from the powerpack to the screws, then wired each streetlight to the screws. It worked great…both lamps lit equally when powered by the screw. I tested a third lamp to see if the other two dimmed at all…nosiree Bob, not on my watch. That’s when I got the idea to continue to drive the wood screws through the floor of the station. Doing so tightly holds the wiring underneath the platform…that’s a good thing.

Coolest, though, is that the upper portions of the screws provide equal electrical access to just about anywhere in the Ukrainian Section…farther, in fact. I have a crummy old extension cord from which I cut the head and tail some time ago, expecting to use the wiring for some dopey project. I wired another of the Christmas light bulbs to one end and wrapped the other end around the screws…Dude! Long distance lights!

In theory one could use that extension cord to replicate the screw-terminal dealio in the Ukrainian Station, daisy-chaining lighting systems far into the night.

So, that’s my discovery for the day. Yep, my wife is mad at me…even though I framed in and wallboarded up a wall in my daughter’s closet, it still didn’t outweigh the time on the railway.

This a delicate balancing trick, my friend….delicate! At least I now have lights to see what I’m doing!

Europeanification. It’s a word. Go ahead, look it up. I’ll wait. It’s not? You, my friend, must have a cheap dictionary!

As you know, the Bachmann Big Hauler 4-6-0 is now a Bachmann Not-So-Big Hauler 4-4-0. It’s lost its glitzy green hue, instead wearing a coat of dowdy brown Rust-Oleum. I think it’s pretty cool looking, myself. Kind of tough and industrial but charming at the same time. My plan had been to paint it black, but the brown Rust-Oleum was all I had in the garage.

My brother is a graphic artist, and a wizard at Photoshop. He emailed me a picture of my own locomotive in black paint! And it looks pretty cool – much more macho!

But the Paris to Peking Railway travels from, get this, Paris to Peking. I just can’t see some Parisian firm buying an American locomotive when their own are so abundant. No matter how I paint the Bachmann Not-So-Big Hauler it’s still going to have an American outline. Unless, of course, I follow the clues given by my brother, and paint the thing in MS Paint!

I leafed through a bunch of Model Railroader magazines and a book on my shelf called Encyclopedia of Trains. It’s a book filled with all kinds of drawings and photographs of locomotives. Like you, I picture long strings of box cars or passenger coaches when I think of trains, not just a locomotive. The book is clearly titled to sell to people who plan to give it as a gift and don’t know a fiddler’s fart about trains!

Anyway, I tried to find common European attributes to locomotives built prior to 1910 that I could model with my limited brain power and modeling skills. Round windows on the cab seemed to be pretty popular, as did saddle tanks. The Europeans tended to put the headlight down low, just in front of the boiler. And they used that interesting buffer system.

I opened my picture of the 4-4-0 in a program by Serif called Photo Plus. It’s available as a free trial download from Serif.com, and is a really powerful picture editor. I take my pictures most often with my Blackberry Curve, although the detail shots come from my old Sony Handycam that I dropped in my swimming pool. Yes, yes I did. I caught if before it hit the bottom, but I don’t think it was designed as an underwater camera. It took two weeks to dry out, and doesn’t like to shoot video anymore, and the auto exposure board took a hit, but the lenses are fine, and if you’re careful with it, it still shoots great pictures! I use it to make videos, only shooting them in studio, and the Handycam is Firewired to my computer. As the computer does all the recording, the camera just acts as a lensing unit. Am I off topic?

Between Serif and MS Paint I conjured up the picture you see above. I figure I can close up the cab’s existing windows with sheet plastic and then carve new, round ones. The cowcatcher is held on by two screws. That bar in the front that holds the buffers – I can make that out of laminated craft sticks, or, gasp, a single piece of wood.

Those tanks, however, are causing a bit of consternation. I could make them out of sheet styrene, but they will take a lot of handling, as that’s the primary pick-up-the-locomotive spot. Wood? Polished and lacquered wood might hold that shape. It would be heavier than empty plastic, too.

Why go through this Europeanification process? Why not stick with the LGB 0-4-0. Well, the LGB will remain on the roster, for sure, as will the New Bright 2-6-0, if only for comic relief. But I’m just dying to see if an ultra-heavy locomotive (six, count ‘em SIX D-cell batteries in the boiler) can tame the wild rails of the China Section. If it can, and I’m thinking it will, it will open the ENTIRE China Section to rail travel once more. If that happens, this is the first of a long line of battery-powered pieces that look European, effectively eliminating the tyranny of AC power.

My little black canine idiot has, of course, completely buried the China Loop again, so I’ll have to dig THAT out before I can test this guy out. Still, I believe this is progress…

The Paris to Peking Railway is a complete railroad between the turnouts. Not a complete railway, mind you, but a complete railway between the turnouts. This equates to about twenty-five feet of fun, free-wheeling railroading excitement from the China Turnout north to the Paris Turnout. But there the fun stops.

I got rather frustrated some time ago at the poor performance of the track in the Parisian Loop, although in those days it didn’t have anything close to such a romantic name: I remember it being something along the lines of “that %$#$! Railroad.”

That was before I discovered that the problem with the track was actually the New Bright 2-6-0 locomotive being so light on its wheels that it can’t tolerate less-than-perfect track. Ooooh, if I only knew then what I know now! I rather roughly removed (tore out) the rails from the Parisian Loop, casting them aside with disdain.

Well, weather, dogs, poor drainage and plants got to my pile of uprooted rails. Looking at it now with a much more sane eye, I see that it was rather good stuff! I must use the past tense of the verb, however, for I’m afraid the rails may have seen their end.

I stumbled across a cache of LGB sectional curves in excellent condition. They were hiding in the back of my train cabinet, itself a shanty-like lean-to at one end of the house. My trains and their accessories share their space with the lawn mower and edger. At least they’re out of the rain!

The track sections are really quite nice; heavy brass rails and joiners and everything. But they are curved. I really need about six feet of straight track to link the east side of the Parisian Loop to the Paris Turnout. The west side is still there, ending at the start of the curve. I figure I can use the sectional track to get around the curve and connect to…well, to nothing, because I don’t have any straight track.

Looking again at the old rails I so callously removed, they remind me of roller coaster track. I have a feeling the New Bright won’t do very well on it, no matter how much I try to straighten it out!

But I do have a strategy. I’m thinking I can cut the ends off the curly-cued old rail, gaining as much as two feet of potentially workable track. Two feet isn’t six, but it’s better than nothing!

The Parisian Loop features another exciting item that must be managed: the stump. There once was a mimosa tree planted inside the wye of the Parisian Turnout. That tree dropped a prodigious, even epic amount of effluvia into the swimming pool. On windy days I frequently came home to find the entire pool buried under an inch-thick carpet of mimosa blossoms. Good by, Mr. Mimosa.

But that stump is a tough nut to crack. The wood is immensely dense, even more so than I am, and very wet, even though the darn thing is dead. I’m afraid the stump will need to go before we can go any farther into the Parisian Loop.

The board of directors is quite upset, particularly because they’re losing their weekend to that stupid stump, and it’s a weekend of hard labor!

But, lest we forget, Garden Railroading is Real Railroading. I’m sure that real railroaders must clear forests and excavate stumps, so this will be a prototypical operation. But that still doesn’t mean I’m looking forward to it!

Although it’s fading into pastiche of other memories, the thrilling Wyatt Exposition Day did have one dark moment. Young Wyatt shoved the LGB 0-4-0 up and down the track, eventually stopping it in front of the 1/18th scale farmhouse forlornly propped in a corner in the Ukraine Section. He stopped running the train and stared at it.

“What happened to this one?” he asked.

I searched for the terms that would explain to this four-year-old enthusiast that it’s a kitbashed farmhouse from a superbly detailed WWII playset that was given to me by my stepson about a decade ago that I threw together to impress him into thinking the railway was cooler than it is because it doesn’t go nearly as far as he had anticipated. But that seemed so long…

“Is it a haunted house?”

“Yes, it’s a haunted house. That’s why it looks all run down like that. It’s haunted!” I chortled, saved for the day.

And that is why Wyatt is welcome to come back to the railway any old time. Give him an explanation he can accept and it’s done!

Well, of course I can’t leave the house looking like that! It’s in the Ukraine of 1910, before the depression and the world wars. This is supposed to be a happy Ukraine, and a blown up farmhouse just doesn’t fit.

Having successfully hacked up the LGB Pola station, I tried the same technique on this very nice, albeit battle-damaged, structure. It’s made by a company called Panache Place, the American division of a Hong Kong company called Unimax, and marketed under the brand name Forces of Valor, and really is very nicely detailed. Unlike the LGB’s solid walls, these guys are hollow styrene. Where the saw left a nice, finished wall on the LGB it left an ugly gaping hole on the Forces of Valor. That’s okay – they can face the corners!

Assembling the corner, which is all of the house I had available after hacking away the battle-damaged pieces, was rather like building a jigsaw puzzle. Still, a little judicious application of glue here, a little filing there, and voila, a quarter of a house!

I used the same technique for building the platform upon which it sits as I did for the station: cut a piece of plywood and screw a board to it. Now you know my secret technique! I’ll probably plank this platform with popsicle sticks rather than coffee stir-sticks just to make it look different.

There are some modifications that need to be done. Floors and a roof might be nice, and windows could use some glass. And a coat of paint wouldn’t come amiss, either!

There’s a bit of dilemma brewing around all three of my partial structures, and it involves my seven year old daughter and her friends, and young Mr. Wyatt as well. I’m of the mind that the insides of these structures should be furnished to the hilt so that you can see something when you look into the windows. My daughter wants to furnish them herself. But, and this may come as a shock to you, a seven year old doesn’t have quite the same sense of scale and appropriateness as I do. I’ve hit the wall that delineates the difference between scale models and play value. Drat!

My compromise for the moment is to complete the outsides, making them both attractive and robust, but leaving the insides to her. I’ll just turn the internal lights off when I have guests!

Unless the guests are in the seven year old bracket, in which case we won’t be running the trains at all but using the buildings to play host to Polly Pockets and Littlest Pet Shop!

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.