Poolside Rails

As you recall, I’ve been working on planning the Paris Portion of the Paris-to-Peking Railway. I don’t think we’re really going to end up in Peking…the China Loop on the railway is so rural, and makes such a nice contrast to the hustle and bustle of the Paris to Be.

But this is Paris of 1910…not quite the Paris to Be but the Paris What Was. Photographs of Paris are easy to find, but most of ‘em are tres moderne, not pre-WW I Paris. Out of the blue, however, an inspiration swoops in and says “dude, I’m, like, here!”

I had a bad Friday. Wasn’t feeling well. My wife was cranky with me. I forgot our anniversary. I picked up a couple of CDs I thought she’d like, just as sort of a little “oopsie” kind of a thing. I was quickly and swiftly notified that this was unsuitable as an anniversary present. I really didn’t mean that it was supposed to be a bonified anniversary present…but, move over, Rover,there’s plenty of room in the dog house. It was a bad Friday.

Saturday the missus spent the day at her mother’s house, cleaning and cleaning and other stuff. I spent the day at our house, working on the Bachmann Not So Big Hauler and building these pretty cool shelves for the living room and hanging out with my eight year old daughter. We watched The Penguins of Madagascar and Spongebob on Nickelodeon in between our various tasks. Now it was evening, and mumsikins still hadn’t returned, which meant dinner was on dad. Not having two nickels to rub together, I cranked out a batch of macaroni and cheese with a can of tuna in it…see, The Idiot, the little black Prince Edward mix puppy, swallowed something he shouldn’t have, and it cut his throat on the inside, so he spent the whole day making a honking noise like a goose trying to barf up something that wasn’t there because he’d really just irritated his throat. I figured I’d give him the tuna juice out of the can and dose it up with olive oil to make his throat feel better. And if it made him shut up, why, I would feel better too!

So we sat down with our mac/cheese/tuna combo, which, if you haven’t tried it and are not faint of heart, isn’t bad, and put on a movie; let’s watch something old, she says, you know, on video.

As you know, I’ve been trying to get a handle on designing the Paris of 1910.

For our movie my daughter picks out Disney’s The Aristocats. Now, just take a wild guess as to where and when the film takes place…go ahead, I’ll wait. I could not believe it!

Of course you realize that the US Government sent Walt Disney and his artists on a goodwill tour of South America in the 1940’s…it was all rather hush-hush, as we were in fact trying to buy goodwill with glitz and Mickey Mouse (el raton Mickey). Disney’s cover story was that he was doing research for a new movie, which would eventually be Three Caballeros. It was pretty intensive research, involving a lot of parties and drinking.

I realize this is all a long diatribe, but there is a point; Disney did his research, because he was big on accuracy. Because he did his research, he’s done mine, too, because I’m big on lazy! Now I have a really nice reference as to what Paris of 1910 looked like! Of course it’s not a business district in the movie, but the architecture will be similar, and there’s an unmistakable feel in the film that will be great to capture on the PtoP.

You know our motto is Garden Railroading is Real Railroading. I’m not sure how a Disney movie about singing cats fits into that…I’ll let you figure that one out!

Sorry it’s taken so long to get to this post…goodness, time is fun when you’re having flies! Since the Dreadful Event we’ve been working on my mother-in-law’s house to get it ready for sale…painting, cleaning, moving furniture, getting stuck with the in-laws for a dinner at this shi-shi restaurant picked out for its selection of wines. I had a great chat with my eight year old over a twenty dollar pasta dish of which everybody had to have a taste so yours truly got about three forkfuls…twenty bucks just doesn’t go as far as it used to!

So, On To Paris! Although the rails on the eastern side of the Parisian Loop are, as we say in France, Not There, there is no reason why we shouldn’t start looking seriously at developing the city of Paris itself.

First off, there’s a large backdrop area available along the fence on the western side. There’s a great article in the current Garden Railways Magazine about backdrops. In it the author talks about building faux rocks and mountain ranges up against a fence, but also uses a startlingly realistic photograph of distant mountains to great effect. My only problem with photographs outside, of course, is old Mr. Sunshine, who fades even the prettiest rose…when I was twenty-three I had a whoppin’ affair with a woman who was forty. Now I’m fifty five, which makes her…gasp…seventy-two. Safe to say the blush is off that rose. Way, way off.

My plan is to lay a nice sky blue/white blend down a plywood backdrop and plaster it with layers of false building fronts, probably of that mysterious blue foam. I have combed my local Lowe’s, but there is no blue foam to be had, only the white Popcorn variety.

The resulting background thingy should be about six inches thick, which will add a huge amount of texture to the background. Of course there will be lights in it, too, and that will help give the sense of a large city back there.

One of the biggest hassles we face in Paris is that stupid stump of a mimosa tree. I have cut that thing down three times but never quite got to the root structure. I’m certain the scientific name for the mimosa tree is hellplanticus nokiddingus. I have never in my life seen a nastier, more evil, more management-resistant plant in my life!

So, here’s the plan, and I think you’ll like it: we’ll build around it. Box it in a building, perhaps, or disguise it some other way so that passers by won’t say “my, what an ugly stump!” There’s a great article I saw in Model Railroader last year about disguising posts in your basement with tall buildings…you look at the building and forget that you’re looking at a post. We’ll work up some sort of a treatment for Mr. Mimosa.

I’ve decided not to worry about the rails…for one thing, I’ve planned the Parisian Station to be, well, stationed right in that section of track that is currently lacking in the track department. Why not build city-style rails there, you know, with concrete forming the railway rather than brass rails? Since we’re battery powered there’s no reason not to…unless we rethink electrification. Can you spell Functioning Overheads?

“Gentlemen,” the CEO stands at his chair in the posh Club Room at the luxurious Hotel Americain in Paris, “this is a momentous occasion…an epic occasion.”

“What,” mutters the Chief Engineer who looks oddly like a penguin in his tuxedo, “ha’ ye changed yer socks?”

The room bursts into wild laughter as all of the board members and senior shareholders  clap one another on the back and yell “huzzah!”

“No, no, you simpletons!” the PR Guy leaps to his feet. “This is the 100th Post on the Paris to Peking Railway!”

The room bursts into thunderous applause and even more “huzzahs”.

“Thank you, thank you very much,” the PR Guy blushes and sits down.

“I don’t believe the applause is for you,” the still standing CEO says.

“Oh, of course.” The PR Guy blushes even more deeply.

“The Railway is moving to an important new phase,” the CEO continues. “Where we were in a test and trial mode, trying theories and testing ideas, we are now moving into the production phase…putting it all together to build the railway and get it fully operational.”

“What?!?” the Chief Engineer sputters into his stout.

“But first,” the CEO continues, “let us look at the theories and tests we’ve conducted in these 100 posts:
-Converting the long wheelbase western profile Bachmann Big Hauler 4-6-0 locomotive to a short wheelbase Not-So-Big Hauler 4-4-0 with a European tank engine profile;
-Using the remote control from an inexpensive RC car as a remote unit for a locomotive;
-Building robust structures from insulation Styrofoam;
-Using simple 26 gauge and dowels to model a functional overhead power grid;
-Slicing and dicing the Pola railway station to create a large, open-backed flat structure;
-Testing an finding appropriate retaining wall materials;
-Using inexpensive miniature Christmas lights as a source for structure and street lights;
-Testing the interaction between rail quality and locomotive design;
-and, finally, creating fine looking woodwork with craft and popsicle sticks!

“The list is impressive, my friends, but nothing compared to what comes next! Next we will see …
-Completion of the rails themselves, and complete electrical connection from P to Shining P;
-The rise of the magnificent city of Paris, glittering with electrical lights, from what is now a festered miasma of railway detritus;
-The replacement of the out of scale trestles with  fine stone edifices carved from stacked Styrofoam layers;
-The forestation of the China Section;
-People, animals, and every manner of realistic flora and fauna the hardy traveler can expect to see between Paris and Peking;
-and the development of the finest fleet of rolling stock one can imagine!”

The room bursts into wild applause, and the air is filled with cheers.

Well, I’ve got my work cut out for me! The time has come to quit goofing around testing ideas and start applying them. I believe that’s what you’re going to see in the next 100 posts.

Thank you for riding with us so far along the Paris to Peking Railway. We’ve enjoyed sharing these 100 posts with you, and can only promise even more fun in the next 100 to come!

“I’ll believe I’ll be having another stout,” the Chief Engineer mutters.

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!

All right, now, enough birthday talk, back to work. Just so you know, there weren’t any pictures with yesterday’s post for two reasons; my wife is terribly camera shy, and I made the post from my Blackberry. Just like President Obama!

I had designed, and my brother fixed and modified in Photoshop, large oval windows, two each on each side of the Bachmann Not-So-Big Hauler, the 4-6-0 that I quasi-successfully modified down to a 4-4-0. It looks mighty nice on paper, well, a digital image on a monitor, anyway.

In looking at it, however, it’s really difficult to get that graceful French curve (draftsmen out there are allowed to snicker) that makes the windows look so…well, French!

I carefully cut a slip of paper to make a template in the same fashion as for the front windows. But these side windows need to be so much more elegant, more elliptical, to capture the essence of Frenchy-ness, that I’m not sure how good this will look.

The piece of paper didn’t snuggle down as nicely on the side of the locomotive as it did on the front because I didn’t shave off the window frame from the side windows. I don’t think of it as laziness that keeps me from doing the necessary steps, I think of it as “economy of motion”. Here’s my thinking: why go through the hassle of shaving off the molded on window frame before I cut the windows? If I do that, I’ll have to sand the side of the cab twice – once for the windowsill and once to smooth out the windows. Why not do it once? Well, now I know.

As before, I cut a rectangular piece of paper to match the size of the windows I plan to install. I folded it once lengthwise and once widthwise, so that I had a nifty little wad of paper. Using sharp scissors…believe me, they are the only thing around here that’s sharp!…I cut what I figured was a smooth French-like curve from one corner of the folded paper to the other, making sure, of course, not to cut the spine of the fold, only the outer edges. Once the cut was done I unfolded the paper and, voila (that’s French for TA DA!), I had a nice ellipse.

I used a glue stick to smootch the template to the side of the cab. Covering the other half of the cab with a piece of paper, I blasted it with my Rust-Oleum purple paint. Then I un-smootched the template and stuck it on the unpainted half of the cab, covered the first half with the paper, and blasted it again.

The result? Well, not what I wanted. Well, maybe it is. The cab was painted Rust-Oleum brown, but I cut away the windows and filled in the space with white plastic. Once I oversprayed it with purple Rust-Oleum, I’m afraid it looks like a pair of sick Easter eggs…no so very elegant, I’m afraid.

And then, insult to injury, I was in a rush to clean up my mess, so I threw away the piece of paper I used to cover the cab…rolled it into a ball and tossed it in the recycle bin. Before I rolled it up, of course, I carefully removed my window template and stuck it to it so I wouldn’t lose it. Oops!

Once the windows are cut on the left side, I’ll trace them onto a NEW piece of paper and use that as the template for the right side. Goodness, this is all so complex!

We, my brother and I, had designed in this nice looking curve at the trailing edge of the cab. EHHHHHH. Wrong answer! There’s a frame that runs athwartships (look it up, it’s a real word! (I’ve written a novel about the great days of sail…I know my stuff! It’s a word that means from side to side.) of the locomotive, so we shan’t be carving any elegant curves in that. But I had this idear…that’s how my Bostonian mother in law pronounces it…of installing coolly curved fillets instead. NOW you’re talking!

Yes, this is complex. Yes, I’m making it harder than it should be because I’m taking shortcuts that end up being really long cuts. Am I learning anything from this? I should be! Are you?

You know how I’m always raving about my wife. It’s because she’s a wonderful, terrific woman. She’s warm and sensitive and funny, and utterly, blindingly brilliant. Well, today is her birthday. Yes, she’s turned twenty-nine…again.

She grew up on the outskirts of Edward’s Air Force Base, and has some great stories to tell. Lancaster, CA, of the late 60’s was a rough and tumble place. About once a week the police would find a dead body out there in the desert. One afternoon Suzanne and one of her sisters stumbled across one…at least it looked like one. It turned out to be a department store mannequin, a female, stripped naked and tossed between the tumbleweeds.

The girls thought this a great find and dragged it home. Their mother thought it was hilarious. Suzanne’s father had had one or ten too many that night and tumbled his soused self into bed without even a “sleep tight”. Mom and the girls dressed the mannequin in a negligee and put it in bed next to dad.

Next morning mom is making pancakes for the kids when they hear dad’s sarcastic roar from the bedroom: “hah hah hah, very funny.”

So what does this have to do with railroading?

Well, NASA used to do spaceflight testing out at Edwards. I was hiking out there with the Boy Scouts a few years ago, and we came across a pair of tubular rails that stretched for thousands of feet across the desert.

Before NASA could commit humans to spaceflight they wanted to make sure the body could withstand the intense accelleration of a rocket shot. They built a sled and mounted a whup-ass big rocket motor to it and launched it down these rails.

Suzanne’s dad was on hand early in the project, when they were ready to run the sled but not ready to endanger a human. A bunch of these engineers went up into the nearby San Gabriel mountains and shot a brown bear with a tranquilizer dart. They had treed the poor guy, but he feel asleep and out of the tree.

They loaded his slumbering bulk into their pickup truck and went back out to the rocket sled. I can only imagine the scene of these six or seven slide-rule guys in lab coats manhandling that bear into the cockpit of the rocket sled.

They waited for the bear to wake up and the punched the igniter on the rocket sled. The sled shot past whirring cameras, stopping with a thump and without fuel at the railstop a mile away.

The bear was not happy. The engineers anticipated this and approached cautiously, tranquilizer rifles at the ready. What they didn’t anticipate was the even coating of angry bear poo that was smeared across every inch of the canopy, the cockpit, and the bear!

They let the bear have it with another dose of sleepy darts and loaded him back into the pickup. He ended the adventure, poo-smeared and snoring, at the base of the very tree from which they knocked him. What a story that bear had for his kids! “You wouldn’t believe the day I had…”

My point? Well, as you know, Garden Railroading is Real Railroading except when it comes to collosal fecal elements. Perhaps the bear story has…no, there’s no point except that my wife is one terrific lady and I am terribly lucky to be with her, and I wish the very happiest of 29th birthdays!

Now that we’ve settled this scale issue, I reckon I can finish up the conversion of the Bachmann 4-6-0 locomotive. As you’ll recall, may plan was to upscale it from 1/20.3 to 1/18. The upscaling included shortening the wheelbase to handle my ultra-tight railway curves and widening the cab to match a 1/18th scale combine with which I’ve been dawdling.

If you’ve been following along, you’ll know that I rather completed the Ukraine Station platform and placed “in situ” before checking clearances. My 1/18th modified cab very definitely conflicts with the station platform, extending a good inch over it. I had to abandon the widening portion of the project. I decided I could use the Bachmann-supplied 1/20.3 cab instead. Oh well.

I reduced the locomotive from a 4-6-0 to a 4-4-0 by removing the forward driving wheels. But then the locomotive looked really stupid, so I hacked out a piece of the boiler on the locomotive, removing the section that held the forward dome. The locomotive tapered from back to front…not anymore. The four-wheel pilot truck looked really stupid, too, as it is very long. I hacked a section out of the center of that, using epoxy and a piece of wood to reconnect the ends.

I noticed the other day that, even after having removed the forward drive wheels, the middle set of drive wheels still tend to pop out of the curves. SO, Captain Whizbang here decided to remove the SECOND set of wheels and replace them with non-flanged wheels. I now have this interesting locomotive with four flanged pilot wheels and two flanged drivers. I haven’t tested it yet, but I’m not expecting fireworks.

One of the more interested problems lies in the angle of the driving rods. I’m not sure how I compressed the dimension, but now the driving rods extend back from the valves at a weird angle to the rearmost drive wheels. They run okay, but look decidedly odd. Because I moved the wheels around, the molded driving rod pegs on the wheels no longer apply. The main driving rods crashed in the pegs on the forward wheels. I used my simulated Dremel tool to grind off the ends of those pegs.

When I tried to get the thing to run down the track the connecting rods crashed against the wheel hubs of the middle drivers! The simulated Dremel tool came back out so that I could grind down the wheel hubs to the ends of the axles. Then the driving rods conflicted with the hubs on the rear drivers…my goodness, so many conflicts in such a small space!

I spray painted the whole shootin’ match with Rust-Oleum brown….the darkest color on hand. Eventually the thing will be gloss black, but I wanted to get an idea of what it looked like. You remember building your Star Wars-style spacecraft out of bits and pieces of other kits, don’t you? It looked really crummy until you painted it all the same color…then it looked pretty cool! Same thing applies to kitbashed rolling stock.

With much wailing and gnashing of teeth, much grinding of plastic and swearing, the first custom-built locomotive for the Paris to Peking Railway is finally…well, almost…complete…sort of.

As far as I can remember, Paris is in Europe, probably France. And Peking, now Beijing, is in China. Neither one of these places would run western prototype locomotives…another design change!

Speaking of China, here’s a little tidbit that will help you out next time you go out for Chinese food:

When the waiter asks you how you liked it, say “HUN hao.” You pronounce hun the same as you would when referring to Attila The. Hao is pronounced like How, but with an “ah” after the “H”. Got it? In Chinese, “Hao” is good. “BU hao” (pronounced BOO how) is bad, “HUN hao” is very good. Don’t tell the waiter the food was “BU hao” – you’ll insult him.

And don’t tell him the food was “ma ma HU hu” (mah mah HOO hoo). It’s the Chinese way of saying “eh.” If he asks you “how are you this evening?” you can say “ma ma HU hu”, and he will laugh. Most westerners don’t use “ma ma HU hu”, but we should. It’s slang, but it’s very common in China. Shouldn’t we show a little interest in other people’s culture? If you were working in China, wouldn’t you get a kick out of your Chinese customers trying to use your language? I know I would.

There you go. There’s you tip for the day! I’m afraid it was better than the tip I gave to the waiter. He looked at it and said “ma ma HU hu.”