Poolside Rails

Warped Boards!

As you well know, there’s an adage that says it never rains in Southern California. There’s another one that says an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. There still one more that says stupid is as stupid does.

Well,  you probably know we Californians are dying for rain…after all these years of drought, we’re down to putting on galoshes and pulling out the bumbershoots when we see a cloud! So we were delighted to welcome this most recent deluge last week!  Even though it wreaked havoc on the house…it’s been a long, dry year…it was wonderful to have water fall from teh sky so early in the fall!

The roof leaked over my son’s room, and he’ll soon be the happy recipient of new drywall and flooring when I discover where the water got in. It also leaked here in my office…ol’ Bessie the computer almost got drenched. Almost.

Things weren’t so happy outside. Oh, the track held up – brass rails on plastic ties don’t care much about water.  The Forces of Valor Farmhouse held up just fine. The Pola railroad station building got wet but is now dry. That’s the good news.

It’s that deck – my beautiful hand-laid coffee-stir-stick masterpiece that took the damage.  Makes me, a grown man, father of three, want to cry.

It's Ruined!

What is particularly distressing about this tragedy is that I took the precaution of bathing, and I do mean bathing, the deck in waterproofing juice before I stained it. As you’ll recall, I actually was concerned that the waterproofing would repel the stain!  That was my ounce of prevention.

But, in thinking about it, I seem to recall my wife watching me splash on the skim-milky looking waterproofing stuff…Thompson’s Water Seal, I think. She watched for a while as I slathered it on.

“Don’t you think that’s rather thin?” she asked with arched eyebrow.

Now, it’s a guy thing, I know it, but I was three quarters of the way through with the project. You’re a guy…you would have said the same thing:

“Nope, it’s fine.”

“I think you’re supposed to mix it up, like paint,” she said before she left.  She has her Master’s Degree in Russian literature…she knows BS when she sees it.

“Nope, it’s fine,” I replied.

The can of water seal was stored outside, see, for, like, a long time. The lid had rusted onto the can. I had to use a pair of vise-grips to get it open, and you can just imagine what those vise-grips did to the thin steel cap of the water seal can. Mangle city! Now, this is one of those gallon sized rectangular steel cans with the easy-pour spout and a handle and everything.  Because the pour spout is only two inches wide, you can’t get a stir stick down in there to shake things up. Because I’d screwed up the screw top to the can, it won’t go back on, making shaking the can itself a very messy proposition.

I knew the stuff wasn’t right, but I’m an optimist in addition to being a somewhat dim bulb. I figured there was probably some degree of water protection in the milky effluvia in which I bathed the platform. And then I stained it with something that said it had a varnish in it. That should have worked, shouldn’t it?

Well, it didn’t.

It seems to me it took just about forever to cut down all those coffee-stir sticks and glue ‘em down and sand the crackers out of ‘em.  Looking in my account of free time to rework something on which I’ve already spent a gajillion hours, I find there are precious few minutes there. Hmph.

Oh, sure...the bad roof's just fine!

To add insult to injury, take a look at the roof on the Forces of Valor Farmhouse. Do you see how the rows of shingles form columns, too? Now go take a look at any shingle roof…hey, those rows are offset from one another! When I was done shticking those shingles down I nailed the roof with a quick coat of Rust-Oleum brown. That’s when I spotted the mistake.

I’d be willing to redo that roof because of the error, but of course that roof held the water out just fine!

So my pride and joy, the one piece of woodworking I’ve ever done in my life that actually looks half decent is wiped out.

My favorite battle in World War II is Midway. I’ve always been fascinated by the intricate timing and the seemingly unbelievable coincidences that led to the American victory. I often think about what happened over in the planning room of the Japanese high command when they found out that four of their six carriers, the very backbone of their strategy for the entire war,  were now gone.  I’ve often wondered what it’s like to find your resources suddenly swept off the board.  Now, there’s no way to equate the damage done to my little platform with the incredible sacrifices of both fleets at Midway, and this is an improper reflection. Please disregard.

So, it’s back to the drawing board. What do you think of this? Scrape off the stir sticks and replace ‘em with unwarpy ones, and then spray the crackers out of ‘em with Rust-Oleum brown, and then sand away the tops to accept a stain and a coat of varnish? In theory the paint would provide a nice water seal all the way around the boards, and the varnish over the stain would protect the tops and make ‘em look purty. The seams would looked caulked between the boards, too!

So what lesson did we learn?  Well, it doesn’t rain on your HO layout in the basement, does it? You can make roofs out of toilet paper and they’ll last a decade!

But out here in the yard we must never, never forget: Garden railroading is REAL railroading!

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!

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!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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