Poolside Rails

I thought it was going to be this weekend – I really did. I had visions of planted hillsides drifting around in my head. I even went so far as to spend time (precious time, I’ll have you know!) with my daughter on Saturday afternoon amending the soil to make ready for…ready for…ready for…nuttin’, that’s what!

Although it violates a sacred family rule, and is the kiss of death for those plants, I swear that one of these days I’m gonna rush out there and plant those darn things myself!

“I say,” the CEO nudges the CFO. “Isn’t that some sort of labor violation or something?”

“It would be,” the CFO replies sleepily, “if we had any labor.”

“Aye, ye cheap skin-flinty son of a mutant moose,” the Chief Engineer mutters into his stout.

The CEO looks over his pouty cheeks at the Chief Engineer. Clearly something is troubling his old friend.

I can tell you from a hundred miles away what’s troubling: lack of progress! Some days it seems like the railway progresses at a hundred miles an hour…new track discoveries, electrification of the rails, new buildings. But then come these terrible slows, when all we do is fight off the dog and wait for things to happen. I hate waiting for things! I want it now Now NOW!!!

Okay, that’s over with. We were actually quoite productive over the weekend. Perhaps our biggest triumph was The Rock Wall.

This new structure, assembled from the ultimate space-age material, rock, replaces the firewood logs, which temselves replaced the popsicle-stick retaining wall along the south side of the China Curve on the Paris to Peking Railway. Although compound, I do believe the preceding to be a proper sentence.

Finding the rocks in my backyard was not a problem: Zorro the Idiot Dog routinely rolls them down the hillsides and onto the rails. Placing them so that they are visually and logically pleasing was a little more challenging. Here in Southern California we have thrust mountains, with longs streaks of ancient seabed striping their faces. How cool would it be to model that?

Well, it would be cool, but it would take a lot more landscaping effort than I’ve got in these bones. I imagine you could stain concrete in various exciting desert colors and then stack ‘em up at odd angles…that would be cool, and not very hard to do. If you dyed the concrete while it was wet it would weather well, too!

Anyway, the north face of the southern side of the China Curve now has a rock retaining wall to protect the rails from the attack of Zorro the Idiot…Hold on a moment…there…I just went out and took a picture of the zone as it appears tonight, a full three days after the wall went up: holding like a champ!

As important as the retaining wall made of stone is, it is but a harbinger of things to come. The landscaping will secure the hillsides above the stone, blending all together in a natural looking pastiche that will withstand the onslaughts of wind, weather, and woofers!

“I dunna b’lieve it,” mutters the Chief Engineer. At last count he was on Stout Number Seven, which, when he’s allowed to get this far, is referred to as the “nighty-night stout”.

As if on cue, the Chief Engineer slumps face-first onto the boardroom table, snoring like a drunken railroad man. The rest of the board members tiptoe out, partly out of consideration, partly out of embarrassment, but mostly out of fear…when the Chief Engineer wakes up from the nighty-night stout he’s a real grouch!

“Just like daddy,” quips my seven year old. Yeah. Just like daddy. Charming child.

The CEO chokes on his cigar.

“What?!? What did you say? Rocks?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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…

As you’ll recall from yesterday’s episode, I threw a temporary retaining wall around part of the curve in the China Section of the Paris-Peking Railway to prevent landslides from hitting the rails.

What? What name is that? I thought it was the Paris-China Railway! New Name?

Well, I was in downtown Ventura today and was passed by a rally car from around 1910. Aside from wheezing smoke and popping like a two-stroke, it was festooned with signs showing its inclusion in the Paris-Peking Rally. Remember the movie The Great Race, with Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon, Peter Falk, and…was it Leslie Anne Downs? That car reminded me of that movie which reminded me of the Paris-Peking Rallies which are now Paris-Dakar due to the changing political landscape of the Middle East. Phew.

Anyway, I like Paris-Peking Railway. It has a nice ring to it, and rolls trip-trippingly off the tongue. Go ahead, try it: Paris-Peking Railway. Nice, huh? Enough foolishness.

While installing the temporary fence yesterday, I espied with my little blue eye another landslide about three feet north of the one against which I was battling. Aside from feeling just a tinge of defeat, I realized that section of track would need a different treatment.

This new landslide fell from the south side of the track, not the north, and close to the crest of the new mountain. In fact, it fell in precisely the place where I’d planned to install a road bridge.
Well, you know how one thing leads to another, and here we are back in Google SketchUp again. I’ll admit this drawing isn’t the best, but it helps us place the final structure in our minds.

Although Garden Railroad is Real Railroading, sometimes you have to create a little reality to explain why things are the way they are. My story goes that the rail line follows an old wagon road, used by farmers and villagers alike passing to and from market. Because of the lay of the land, however, it was subject to flooding. SO, when the emperor chose the route for his royal highway, he chose to build a stone bridge over the old road rather than dip his road down to cross it and run the risk of flooding. Yes, it’s a stretch. No, it doesn’t matter. But, it gives us a reason to put a fancy stone bridge along the railway.

The SketchUp model spans a foot at the arch barrel, the inner curve of the bridge. The barrel is also one foot tall. The railings rise three inches above the roadbed. I’m thinking we’ll build the sides out of sheet plywood and cover them with a stone-studded-stucco outer layer. Go ahead, say that three times fast, I’ll way. I imagine we’ll plank the deck of the bridge, running ribs along the inside of the plywood to hold the popsicle stick planks…did I say popsicle sticks? You bet…cheap, durable, and available. We’ll coat the deck with another stucco slurry, perhaps studded with a uniform gravel to look like cobblestone.

The model shows a stone retaining wall. In reality there will be four, one on either side of the track and on either side of the bridge. I haven’t decided on a material for those yet. What would the emperor have used?

As you can see, the Paris-Peking Railway is beginning to take shape. I’ll be happier once the mountain is planted and we can step away from all this retaining wall nonsense!

Looking at these pictures, I know you think I’ve lost my mind. I can’t say as I blame you. This pictures don’t tell a very good story, do they?

As you recall from yesterday’s episode, my New Bright 2-6-0 had trouble making it through the China Section. Part of it was because the rails are out of gauge. But more trouble came from the fact that copious amounts of dirt had been kicked onto the track by my canine friends.

Here’s the problem: until my China Section Mountain is planted, my southern section is subject to frequent landslides. Here in California landslides are frequently triggered by earthquakes that occur along our many fault lines. On my railroad, the landslides are the dogs’ fault.

I was working on another project this morning here in my shop and spotted my popsicle stick collection (not that I collect them, but I do have quite a pile of them). Hey, I thought, those look like fence slats. Well you know how one idea stacks on top of another and another and before you know it you have a plan.

I had a small collection of ¼ x ¼ square dowels…can you have square dowels?…that looked just the right size for fence posts. I say “had” because I used ‘em all up on this project. With those dowels for posts and popsicle sticks for slats, what could be easier?

As you know, the original builder laid down a six inch wide concrete roadbed. My plan was to drive the fence posts into the mountain at the edge of the roadway. I cut the posts to six inches in length, planning to sink an inch into the ground.

Using my trusty bench vise and a keyhole saw, I stacked the craft sticks up 22 at a time and sawed the rounded ends off of them. Then I soaked everything in Thompson’s Water Seal and let it dry before using it.

Here’s the thing: there are no fasteners of any kind on that fence. Firstly because this is a temporary fence that will most likely be removed once the landscaping is in place. Secondly because gluing the thing in place, or worse, pinning it with scale nails, would be quite difficult. The road curves, which to my limited thinking means the construction would have to take place in situ rather than on the workbench. Well, that rules out epoxy because the set time is too short. AND that rules out GOOP because there is too much dirt present…have you ever used GOOP and gotten dirt in it? And that rules out scale nails because there’s no support to back your tap-tapping with the hammer. Finally, and this is the worst reason of all, but here it is: the dirt seems to hold it just fine! The goal of the fence is to get the dirt off the rails and provide some degree of protection from the passing paws of colossal canines. I think it works just fine for that.

So, there it is, a temporary Not So Great Wall of China. It works great for the moment! Tomorrow is Saturday, and I might luck out and get my landscaping installed. But what will become of the fence? Only time will tell…