Poolside Rails

Now, my wife is a wonderful, beautiful, and brilliant woman. She really is brilliant, with a Master’s Degree in Russian literature. And my kids are very smart and kind of look like me, which I take as a sign that they really are mine. I point all this out as evidence of the fact that I aint no dummy. But I’m not smarter than my plumbing.

I must apologize for not writing yesterday. My writing hours were absorbed by the drains in my house. The kitchen sink gurgled and bubbled and refused to drain for a while, and then suddenly ran empty.

“Daddy! There’s water all over the garage floor!”

Oh joy.

A quick trip and $35 to Lowe’s and now at least the water drains outside, not in the garage! I spent $22 on a 50ft snake that just doesn’t fit down my drain hole (don’t tell that one to your kids). My 25ft rotary snake fits but can’t reach the blockage, and I am both confused and furious! Stupid pipes. Saturday, oh ho ho ho, wait for Saturday, Mr. Blockage! Aaaargh!

There. Sorry.

One of the great things about our hobby of garden railway building is that it demands so many more skills than our indoor railroading brethren must use. This is not to take anything away from their work…I have seen some true works of genius laid out on benchwork. Google “Bill Aldrich New Haven” and you will find an amazing, exquisite work of art.

But their work is still just scale modeling. Even though modern model railroading involves some rather sophisticated technologies, indoor modeling still involves building scale landscapes and filling them with scale models.

On the wild and woolly garden railway things are not quite so cut and dried. Take, for example, the landscaping battle I must continually fight with Zorro the Wonder Idiot. Unless you have a particularly cranky cat that gets locked in your layout room you don’t really have to contend with the droppings of such wild animals. And I read about a garden railroader who lost his entire pike in a typhoon. If that happened to your basement railroad, you’d be gone with it!

It can truly be said that Garden Railroading is Real Railroading.

It was about this that I was thinking while I considered the best angle of attack on the Europeanification of the Bachmann locomotive. The artist in me really wants to tackle those round cab windows, drilling oblong holes in the cab’s front wall.

“Just do it”, the artist voice says.

“Ye canna do that, ye moron!” wails the Chief Engineer. “Ye must draw yerself a plan!”

“At the very least,” continues the CEO in a surprising show of engineering acumen, “close up the windows with sheet styrene!”

“And sand down the framing,” chimes in the PR guy, “so that it looks nice and purty!”

Well, these guys are probably right. I’ll have pictures of that part of the project tomorrow night, when I get home from the 43 mile commute…let’s see, the Isuzu gets 20 mpg, so each day I use up a little over 4 gallons of gas at $3.00 a gallon, that’s $12 a day times twenty days a month, hmmm, this could get tricky…show of hands? Anyone? Anyone at all? I came up with $37.15…anyone else get that? No? Hmmm. Maybe I’m not so bright after all…

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.

I have such a long list of apologies to make, I don’t think I’ll ever get to them all. So, instead, I’ll apologize for missing yesterday’s posts. My nephew dropped in out of the blue and rather absorbed my posting time. Sorry.

Another area of apologies, as long as we’re on a roll, is for the failure to remove the stump. It remains an obstacle for the Paris to Peking Railway, and well, a stump!

My wife and I decided to take our youngest daughter and the dogs to Mt. Pinos, here in Southern California. If you haven’t been, and you most likely haven’t, you will be amazed. The Chumash, the Native American tribe that used to inhabit this area, thought that the 8,835 foot high promontory was the very center of the universe. If you ever get the chance to go up there, you won’t disagree.

Anyway, that took up Saturday. And Sunday was taken up with doing the stuff I should have been doing on Saturday, and, hey, suddenly it was Monday. And I do mean suddenly!
So, we’re putting the Stump Remoal program on hold for a little bit.

“Bully,” roars the Chairman of the Board of Directors. “Let’s put it off for a decade!”

“Have ye gone daft?” grumbles the Chief Engineer.

We’ve been working on clearing the rails, or at least the roadbed, around the Paris Loop, north of the Parisian Turnout. Part of the reason for the dilapidation of the Paris Loop, it turns out, is that the area was overrun by Creeping Charlie…the plant, not the fellow. Unchecked, the plant buried the existing railroad foundations and accessories under dirt and plant detritus. Amazing what these plants can do, I tell you. Amazing!

One of the items to emerge from what now seems like more of an archaeological dig than a model railroad is what appears to be a lamppost. It has a base about an inch and a half in diameter, through which is stuck a whale of a screw, itself still attached to a plank of an old scale deck. A round pole, G-scale, of course, rises out of the base, and terminates in the remains of a broken light bulb. There appears to be no facility for a shade, although I’m certain there was one at some point.

Two other items of a more electrical nature rose from the wreckage as well. One was a junction box, with outlets in it! Broken off of its conduit but still attached by wires, I have yet to test its connectivity. If it works, this could be a new way to provide electricity to the entire railway from a very convenient location.

Accompanying the outlet is a tag strip – you can see it in the picture. I rifled through my 1996 LGB catalog (you mean there’s a newer one?!?), but could find nothing like it. I think this device will be of great service in figuring out the wiring of the Parisian Loop, if I can ever get it cleaned up!

As you’ll recall, I had a stroke about six years ago. Certain details have been completely erased from my memory. Digging through this Creeping Charlie detritus and retrieving bits of the railroads history is like pulling back cobwebs. On one hand it’s fascinating to find this stuff. On the other hand it’s kind of creepy…what did happen?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You know my rule: measure once, cut twice. It’s not a good rule, but it is one to which I unfortunately subscribe.

I’m an artist. I’d love to sit here and tell you I’m a craftsman, but I’m not. I’m an artist. I like to jump into a project and trust my artistic instinct to get me out. It most often works.

The Ukraine Train Station, however, has proven to be quite the different kettle of fish. Here’s a new set of rules that will save your goose when you attempt a project like this:
1. Don’t Mark the Ruler: I have this nasty habit of marking the ruler with my pencil rather than writing down the precise measurement. When I move to the piece I’m cutting, I simply look for my mark on the ruler. But that depends upon your place the ruler on your stock in exactly the same manner you placed in on the piece you measured. On a good day that’s extremely imprecise. Take your time and write down the measurement…don’t trust that you’ll remember it, WRITE IT DOWN!

2. Use Millimeters Whenever Possible: I embarrassed myself on this project by repeating to myself over and over “Six and three quarters and that little thingy”, meaning the 1/8th mark. My daughter overheard me and asked me what I was talking about. Two mistakes: I didn’t take the time to write it down, and I didn’t use the metric system, because 57mm is easier to remember than six and three quarters and that little thingy. Plus, when it comes time to do mathematic equations, divinding millimeters is infinitely easier than dividing fractions!

3. Learn Your Power Tools: I make digital movies. Rule number one there is to learn your camera’s idiosyncrasies so that you can compensate for them. When I broke out my Hitachi Power Saw to cut the station in half, I didn’t exactly know WHICH line gauge actually matched the blade. As a result, the north wall of the station is slightly longer than the south wall, so that when I go to attach a back wall, it will sit at an angle relative to the front wall. Not to scale, and not cool.

4. Most Important: T H I N K!!! The rest of this article is on the result of rushing and not thinking, so I’ll simplify the rule here: Plan ahead, idiot.

When the time came to cut the piece of plywood for the base of the station, I chose a piece from a stack of junk plywood to which I happen to have easy access (I tore the crummy cover off my patio, which left me with a large, unwieldy stack of crummy plywood. I’m working on creative ways to get rid of it).

Anyway, I knew it needed to be 42 inches long, eleven inches wide at one end and twelve at the other. I was in a hurry to get the station set up, and I didn’t care much about the plywood piece or how carefully I cut it. I got my 18 inch ruler out and quickly measured off the dimensions.

Then I whupped out my Hitachi and quickly carved through the plywood. There was a place, along the long leg that was to face the track, that had a knot right there along the cut line, and it bumped the saw out of line. I roughly re-cut along the line, but it wasn’t a straight line.
I got the station attached to it, and it looked pretty good. I planked it, and simply planked over the jangly front edge. It looks great from the top.

But yesterday I realized I need to plank the front edge of the platform, too. The back side of the platform rests on a cement wall, and the front edge rests on the roadbed, which is, unfortunately, an inch lower than the wall. I added a one inch strip to the bottom of the platform to keep things level. But the bare edge of the plywood, along with the bare wood of the strip, just didn’t look right.

Planking that front edge required me to reduce/eliminate the nasty hump I left when I cut the plywood the first time. If I had dealt with it when I had the Hitachi on it there would not have been a problem, but I rushed it.

Now, because the top was planked, there was no chance to use the Hitachi without tearing everything up. I tried sanding the hump, but that was slow and terribly ineffective. I eventually put a grinder bit in my knockoff Dremel tool and ground it out. It took about an hour to correct a mistake that, if I’d done it right the first time, would have taken three minutes to fix.

The front edge of my platform is a little wiggly…I think the work crew that built it simply had too much potato vodka the night before, as it looks straight to them…thanks to my work with the knockoff Dremel tool, but looks far better than the ridiculously rough outcropping I’d left with my first cut.

The lesson? You can be creative and artistic, and SMART, if you plan ahead and envision the next step to the one you’re doing. Spontaneity has its place, but not in the scale engineering world!

There’s an old story about the farmer who goes to change the oil in his tractor, but finds that the latch is broken on the barn door. He sets his coffee cup on the work bench and reaches for the screwdriver to fix the latch but knocks over the tin can full of screws. While he’s down there on the floor picking up the screws he finds the nut that popped off the lawnmower handle. He goes to get a wrench to replace the nut but discovers that his wrenches are all mixed up, metric and SAE, and sorts them out. He gets the nut back on the lawnmower handle but sees that there’s a hole in the chicken wire fence. He searches for and finds the baling wire to fix the fence but can’t find his leather gloves. Remembering that he left them outside the chicken coop because he got interrupted in repairing that hole in the roof he goes to find the plywood to finish that job. That’s when his wife calls him for dinner. At the end of the day, the tractor’s oil is unchanged and he can’t remember where he left his coffee cup.

That’s how working on this railroad is. You could make the argument that, if Garden Railroading is Real Railroading, annoyances that intrude on real life would likewise intrude on the rail life, and, by gum, they do!

As you’ll recall, Wyatt was supposed to show up on Sunday, but it turns out I misunderstood the plans and he’s showing up this Thursday. I “shirt-sleeve” engineered a cool pair of station buildings to dress up the railway and draw his attention away from the fact that the railway isn’t fully functional as promised. “If you can’t blind ‘em with your brilliance…” I parked the two half-buildings (cut from a single LGB/Pola railway station) on a sheet of plywood. But the plywood is ugly, out of scale, and just plain rife with splinters for Wyatt’s four-year-old fingers. Okay, so I figured I’d use simple popsicle sticks to plank it. But I ran out of trimmed popsicle sticks yesterday. Man, this thing just keeps getting farther and farther afield!

The nice thing about using popsicle sticks is that they are cheap and scale in appearance. The bad thing is that they have rounded ends, which means you’ll have to trim them in order to plank with them. They’re only six mm wide, and lightly waxed, and slippery as the devil. I did some simple math and figured I’d need just under 200 of them to complete the station platform. I’d already installed 82 of them, so I needed another 120. A hundred and twenty coffee stir-sticks? Oh my.

I found it easier to cut that rounded end off of them en masse, rather than one at a time. You can do it single-fashion-wise with a pair of wire cutters, but your consistency goes way, way down. Instead, I chose to stack up a bunch of them and cut them with my knock-off Dremel tool. However, stacking waxed 6mm sticks is easier than it sounds. Remember Mork & Mindy? There was an old lady who called Mindy’s father a “BB stacker”. You’ll feel just like him when you try to stack up these 6mm sticks.

I invented this interesting jig to help with the task. I call it the Ukrainian Stick Stacker, because the station will be, uh stationed, in my Ukrainian Section. You can see the structure in the picture; a back leg, a wide board with a shelf that sits at an angle against the leg, and a weight to hold down the sticks. Simple to build, it performed remarkably well. I taped a piece of masking tape sticky side up to the bottom stick on the stack. Then, once I’d stacked up my 120 pieces I compressed them and packaged them with the tape. No, I didn’t count them as I went; it turns out that each stick is five sticks wide. Once I’d gotten them compressed and taped I simply turned a pair of sticks on their sides and counted by fives up the stack. I hit the right number quite by luck!

Well, most of the station platform is planked with these little fellas, absolutely glued down with a healthy dose of Amazing E-6000 Industrial Strength adhesive. The half I’d done last night was rock hard this morning, so I am not fearful that today’s work won’t form a good, solid bond.

I hope the bond is strong enough to withstand what comes next: a bath in Thompson’s Water Seal. As the railway is out there in the elements, you’ve got to, got to, got to protect the wood from all those things that damage wood.

Tomorrow I’ll finish the last of the planking, and Thursday I’ll seal the crackers out of it. AFTER young Mr. Wyatt shows up, of course!

What happens when you clean up the railway for the exhibition day, you make the lemonade, pour the chips, scrub those tracks until they shine , WD40 all your rolling stock axles, and sweep your track bed so that there isn’t the possibility of the hint of a misplaced grain of sand? Of course, your guest of honor is a no-show.

Turns out Mr. Wyatt was on vacation last week, I’m assuming it was with his family as he’s only four years old, and is making his return trip today. We’ve been watching his dog while he’s been gone, and I distinctly remember his mother saying “we’ll see you Sunday” as they drove off, the little yapper living up to her reputation…the dog, not the mother.

In part I’m disappointed, as I’ve made the lemonade and poured the chips. In truth, the railway looks better than it has at any time in the last ten years, and it almost works. That’s a bonus, isn’t it? So, the day isn’t a loss.

In addition, I had to make some rather robust decisions on the rush to Wyatt Day – decisions that determine the direction and structure of the railway for many moons to come. That’s a good thing, because I tend to procrastinate…actually, I’ve been putting off procrastination for a while!

So, life goes on. Wyatt and his mom will be around tomorrow to pick up the yapper, but I won’t be here, as I’ll be in Los Angeles hawking my novel. But as he wanders the quiet wonderland of a railway without an engineer, I’m hoping Wyatt’s imagination will do the work of the railway for him. Possibly better than running trains could!

Deciding not to let the day go to waste, I opted to work on the LGB/Pola station again. My seven year old daughter has “decorated” the two structures, agreeing to finally let me turn the buildings back to their proper alignment so that the trains can run. Once you cut the building in half down the roof ridgeline, you get two equal sized buildings with no back wall…a natural beacon for young kids to come and “decorate” with their action figures. My little girl was delighted!

I mounted the structures on pins stuck through a plywood base, which forms the foundation for a station platform. But it’s plywood, which looks like, well, plywood. The kindest thing you can say about it is that it’s grossly out of scale.

Enter popsicle sticks, the wonder building material. I used coffee stir sticks, as they work up to a nice looking planking surface for the platform. Stacking them on a piece of masking tape stretched out on my workbench, I built a hefty brick of them.

The brick is taped firmly together so that I can cut the rounded ends off of all of the sticks at once. It’s much easier to cut a solid unit like that than trying to hold a stack by hand. And cutting them one at a time? Forget it!

Tomorrow, once I’ve finished hawking my book, I’ll get down to hacking the heck out of them. My plan is to glue and nail the sticks to the plywood. These guys are pretty flimsy, and I worry about their ability to fight warping. I’ll smear Plumber’s GOOP, which is strong, clear, and waterproof, on the stick, position it on the plywood base, then drive a ½ inch spike through either end. I may drill a pilot hole first, as these sticks tend to split.

It’s a funny thing about cheap materials: they cost you very little in cash, but suck up that other precious resource, time, in working with them. It’s a trade-off, there’s no doubt. But when the dimes are few and far between, and time is the only commodity on hand, you do what you can. That’s the reality of my situation, and, well, Garden Railroading is Real Railroading!

Just for the record, I did say that the popsicle stick/craft stick retaining wall was temporary, correct? Correct! I had, upon its installation, anticipated a quick and thorough landscaping of the China Section mountain. I expected the retaining wall to remain a week perhaps, certainly no more.

Sir Topham Hat would be angry with me, I’m afraid. “You are causing confusion and delay!”

The landscaping is not done. It’s been three weeks since the addition of the retaining wall, and the landscaping crew has yet to lift a finger. I don’t mind saying it’s a little frustrating.

So, I decided it’s time to reconsider that flimsy wall. I really like the look of it, very scale. But it failed to withstand the almost daily assaults of the barking hole diggers. There have been several disastrous breakthroughs, causing some rather horrendous train wrecks.

Here’s the funny story for the day: I took out my trusty digital camera to document the condition of the existing fence and show the installation of the new one. I had Harry Hardworker pose in front of the old fence.

No sooner did I have Harry in place than our newest canine addition, young Zorro, burst over the mountain, scattering dirt absolutely everywhere! Zorro actually kicked the camera just a half second after I got my shot, and I quickly fired again to capture the event! Stupid dog!

The new wall is a trifle more robust, being made up of actual log sections. Now, again, I point out that this is temporary! Eventually, and I mean that in the “within the next month or so” sort of way, I’ll have plants across the top of the mountain and the logs will be no more.

You don’t want to use untreated or raw wood along the garden railway if you can avoid it. As Garden Railroading is Real Railroading, the rot and insects that attack wood in the real world won’t recognize that your real wood is to scale. Hey! I spent three hours carving that! So you have to make absolutely sure you treat your wood with as tough a solution as you can get. I soaked my craft sticks in Thompson’s Water Seal before I installed them, and after three weeks in the ground they still look as good as new.

All that being said, I didn’t treat the logs with anything. You see, I truly believe that the landscaping will be installed within the next two months, and I know the logs won’t rot in that brief amount of time. And, when the plants go in, the logs come out! Hernan Cortez burned his ships so that he would have to conquer the new world…I will have to replace these logs pretty soon!

I’m looking very forward to running the LGB 0-4-0 through the China Section (as far as it gets, anyway) as soon as the new logs are completely installed. It’s odd to travel the tracks with a brush and garden scoop to pull out the loose dirt and, well, the uh, excrement, before running the trains…I never had to do that in the basement!

The other thing about running these rails: I live three miles from the ocean, and it’s foggy almost every night during the spring and early summer. I’m getting used to polishing the rails with a sharpening stone before powering up.

Man! I really liked that battery locomotive…

I called a meeting of the board of the Paris to Peking Railway company this afternoon. I’d have held the meeting in Paris, but, frankly, I haven’t cleared the weeds yet!

The subject on the table was electrification, and the meeting was serious.

Here is the issue: Sunday is the now world-famous Wyatt Day Exhibition on the P-to-P Railway. This young chappy will show up all doe-eyed and innocent, expecting an exciting display of garden railroading fireworks.

“Gentlemen,” I asked, “what have we got?” What I got was a room full of blank looks.

The chief engineer stands up and gives me this report: “The P-to-P Railway has severe operational issues that hinge on the choice of motive power.” He then details the problems with a nifty handout.

Track-Supplied Electrical Power: Turnout issues still not resolved in the China Section, resulting in only partial operation in that area. Further, hidden wiring issues in the Parisian Turnout cause the LGB 0-4-0 to spin its wheels backwards once it clears the turnout to enter the Parisian Section. Obviously there are wiring connections there I have yet to discover! The net result is a nifty looking train that will run the lenght of the main line, about 60% of the China Section, and none of the Parisian Section. As it cannot complete a loop, the train must run the main line engine pushing in 50% of its trips.

Battery Supplied Power: The New Bright locomotive has the ability to complete the China Loop and travel to the very end of the rails in the Parisian Loop. But the design characteristics of the locomotive make it too light to handle the rail “irregularities” in the China Loop. The Bachmann conversion is not complete, and requires some serious intellectual overhauls before it can enter service. The Net Result: The battery-powered 2-6-0 can cover 100% of the China Loop in theory, the entire main line, and all available rail in the Parisian Loop. But weight issues will mean frequent derailments and much wailing and gnashing of teeth.

So, which should we choose? The dirctors are all leaning toward the battery option, as it’s a technology with which they are familiar.

The Chief Engineer slams his fist on the table, upsetting his ashtray and sending his lit cigar skittering across the table and into the lap of Wilmer Fitzgibbons, milque-toast philanthropist and primary financial supporter of the project. Fitzgibbons fixes me with an uncharacteristically nasty glare – it’s clear the pastrami sandwich luncheon wasn’t to his liking.

“It’s transformer supplied DC power you want,” he thunders. “You can manage your locomotive wherever it happens to be-you can’t do that with your simple on-off battery power! You have finesse, control, and ease of operation: the 0-4-0 is plenty heavy enough to handle the China Loop! Don’t be a bunch of babies holding on to outdated technologies out of fear! Embrace change, you bunch of lily-livered cowards!”

The board of directors cowers under this assault.

It is actually the PR guy who breaks the stalemate. He stands up and speaks softly.

“The four-year-old Wyatt is a fan of Thomas the Tank Engine.”

Well, he’s right, of course. The boy was stone cold on the New Bright, with its D&RGW profile. But he was dying to see the 0-4-0T go, because it’s a European profile tank engine.

That cuts it, I’m afraid. Unless I can lay my hands on a European tank engine that’s battery powered and carries the batteries in boiler, we’re going electrical on Sunday.

I adjourn the meeting of the board of directors with a hearty thanks and handshakes all around.
Mr. Fitzgibbons gives me the now cold cigar and admonishes me to watch for a bill from his cleaners and the hotel maitre’d has his hand out. I put the cigar butt in it and tell him “want a tip? Don’t smoke.”

Hey, times are tough for everyone!