Poolside Rails

We’ve reached a dangerous pass on the Paris to Peking Railway, a dangerous pass.  I’ve got the cart firmly before the horse, the bull firmly by the tail so that we may face the situation…our bass is significantly ackwards.

Yes, we got the wire…26 gauge solid core wire from Fry’s. I never even thought of Fry’s as having that kind of stuff, but we were there, and, well, it was there, and, well, here we are. Wired.  Five bucks and we’re set up.

It looks okay. Not great. I imagine greatness will come over time, when I figure out how to get the wire to drape nicely and not remember the kinks and bends I induced stringing it between the poles. I know it’s green…I plan to paint it when I get it to drape correctly. Who knew draping wire was such a pain in the hoo-hoo?  Oh, it looks easy enough, and stringing it between the poles is a piece of cake. But getting it hang correctly, that’s a different fish.

You know how that creative fever gets you going? I just wanted to see if the 26 gauge wire was significant enough to carry power to the Christmas light bulbs, that’s it. Just a test.

But I had built those four prototype poles and stuck ‘em out there already. And I did really want to be sure I could transfer power from one side of the track to the other side overhead…that’s a big thrill for me. Well, naturally I had to string the wire over the poles just once, to see what it looked like and be sure that it would work.

My little girl was playing with her Polly Pockets over at the station building in the Ukraine Section and really wanted me to hang around and keep her company…not play, mind you, but keep her company.

I direct connected the 26 gauge wire from the power pack to the leads that supply power to the lights of the station. Lit up like a champ, and it really took all of 15 seconds to do. Okay, we’ll try running the wires over the poles and then connecting ‘em. Because I’d done all the prework with the plastic bead insulators, that process took all of another minute, and everything worked great.

“Daddy, aren’t you going to stay out here?”

That’s when the Idiot…I mean Wonder Dog…no, I mean the Idiot, decided to jump up on the railway and bashed into my wiring. I had rather wanted to see what would happen in that eventuality, just not quite so soon. You can see from the picture that everything is okay, just a big sag in the wires.

Another couple of minutes found that problem sorted out. But how to get power past the big stone column and over to the Ukrainian Station? Getting wiring past that sucker has been an issue since I first saw the railway, and by gum today seemed to be the day to fix it.

Imagine you were high in the mountains, running telegraph wire alongside the railroad. Here, on this bend, is a huge boulder that leaves you no clearance to place a pole. When you’re done cursing the surveyor and railroad engineer that left you such a tight pass, what do you do? The answer is easy: use the boulder instead of using poles!

Out came the Ryobi power drill, the good one, my crummy masonry drill bits, the Simul-Dremel, and the left over dowel pieces, and I got started. I drilled two holes in the mortar between the  stones of the column…well, I started to. I bought these really inexpensive, spelled c-h-e-a-p,  masonry drill bits from Big!Lots some time ago and had never had a chance to use them.  The bit started in the concrete, made maybe a 16th of an inch dimple, and then quit cutting.  I changed my pressure on the drill every way I could think of, but it made no difference. The bit went instantly dull and quit cutting. Fortunately I had bought a masonry screw kit from Lowe’s, and that included a masonry bit. THAT sucker bored a perfect hole in the mortar.

The length of crossbeam in this case didn’t matter much to me, and so I rather eyeballed a length and said “okay”, hacked off a fair piece of ¼” dowel, drilled two little holes for insulators, and shoved it into the hole, having doused the shoved end with Plumber’s Goop.

Here’s the dilemma, the problem, the big deal: look at the fence in the background. It’s bad. It’s really, really bad. I’m going to have to replace that fence. But replacing the fence? That’s some money, there, bucko…some money maybe I don’t have lying around here.

And there’s that whupping big stump there, too. I’m really excited to move on the wiring, but can’t until I deal with those two issues. Maybe I can skip ‘em both until I come up with some sort of funding for such projects, and move forward with the railway in the Parisian Section. But the wiring really got me today…wiring like this is pretty permanent stuff. In order to replace that fence I’d have to step through the wires like Godzilla…Dadzilla!…and the potential for damage is pretty huge.

Drat!

For Halloween this year we bought a couple of cheapo plastic skeletons from Big!Lots…our plan was to set ‘em up in front yard like they were having tea (we have a seven year old little girl, so bloody corpses are officially off the Halloween list).  To light them we used these very cool little LED light pucks…three bucks each! The pucks worked great, except that they were puck-shaped, not spotlight-shaped. It turned out an empty Diet-Pepsi can fit perfectly around the puck once we cut the ends off. Now they looked like spotlights…but how to mount ‘em out in the yard? I looked around the garage and spotted these nice ¼” by four foot long dowels. A little loop of nylon wire tie fished through the back of the puck led through a little hole drilled in the dowel…dude – adjustable, stakeable battery powered spotlights!

My wife cleaned up the yard and tossed the spotlight/stick units on my workbench.  I put torn shirts and stuff on her sewing table, she puts bits and pieces of stuff I leave around the house on my workbench.  I came to work on the my bridge but was barred from the bench from all these stupid sticks. What did I buy them for in the first place?  Oh yeah, power poles!

If you cut a 48” dowel into three equal pieces, you get three 16” lengths, which works as 24’ scale poles in 1/18th scale.  I figured what the hey, that seems like a good height for a power pole! I cut my 1/4×1/4 inch strip wood into 3 inch lengths to make the crossbeams.

Last time I attempted this little project I carved a nice curved little divot in the back of the crossbeam to accommodate the pole. As you can see the picture, it didn’t work so good; rather dumb to fight gravity with Plumber’s Goop and a nail. Instead I carved a ¼” notched into the pole to hold the crossbeam. Now the pole holds the crossbeam nice and firm, and the Plumber’s Goop and nail combo just makes sure it stays in place. I know, I know, brilliant. I used the Simul-Dremel to do the carving, and it came out pretty nice!

My daughter has this very nice little X-acto pencil sharpener mounted to her desk. It works great on making a killer point on the end of the pole…if you don’t tell her I used it for that, I certainly won’t.

I jabbed the pointy end of the poles into an empty cardboard box and blasted ‘em with black Rust-Oleum to seal out the weather. Then I oversprayed them with brown Rust-Oleum to make them look more wood-like.  Unfortunately, stuck in a box like that, with just that simple crossbar, the picture below looks to me like a scale model of Gethsemane.

My daughter’s  Make-A-Bracelet set supplied a reasonably fine wire to attach wee little beads to simulate the insulators. The wire holds the beads down, and a drop of Crazy-Glue Gel makes sure they stay there. I like the semi-translucent blue plastic of the insulators…looks to me like glass.

There’s an adage about using the right tool for the right job…I’ll have to study up on that one. Way down there at the end of the Ukrainian Station platform there’s a nifty place for a power pole. The biggest drill bit I own that’s smaller than an inch is 3/16”. I drilled a sweet little 3/16” hole to accommodate a ¼” dowel. Oops.  No problem, I’ll just gently drive the dowel into the hole with a few gentle taps with this hammer here. This 4lb Engineer’s hammer. BAM!!!! Well, now the dowel’s in there nice and tight. Unfortunately, I rather cracked it at the mitered crossbeam joint. Not meant to withstand that kind of a whuppin’, doncha know.

So now we have an effective, efficient and cool-looking power pole design. I stuck the other three prototypes between the tracks in the Parisian Turnout. I am surprised each time I walk past at how inhabited the place looks. Just a simple detail brings a ton of life to this forlorn section of the railway!

Wires? That’s this weekend. Once I have the wire, I’ll be able to figure out how far to space the poles to get a realistic drape on the wires…is that drape or droop? Anyway, wire’s a’comin’ this weekend!

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking now that I’ve developed this passion for streetlights down there in the China Section. Actually I’ve been doing a lot of thinking in general. That’s what explains the burnt rubber smell around here.

I think, as I’ve been thinking so much of late, that we shall no longer refer to Zorro The Idiot as The Idiot, but as The Wonder Dog. I got a chance to spend some quality time with him this weekend, and I truly believe him to be a very, very smart little guy. We’ll be celebrating his first birthday at the beginning of October…we’ve only had him since early July. Yes, he chews everything…today I spotted him with an old army man I dug up in the yard, a plastic bottle cap he stole from someone, a shoe, a piece of wood, and a little chunk of feline fecal matter he lifted from the catbox. All that notwithstanding, he’s a good, good dog, and, if you watch him, you can see that he’s trying really, really hard to do the right thing. His little puppy programming just gets in his way. So, from here forward we shall refer to him as The Wonder Dog, as in I Wonder what he’ll destroy next?

Back to streetlights. Would it not be best to have the streetlights on their own circuit, separated from the other lights along the railway? I imagine all of the streetlights along the entire railway will be on one circuit, while…now, you see what I mean? The Wonder Dog just ran by with one of my wife’s slippers. This dog, huh? …while all of the structures will be on another. Although, in thinking about it, one could in fact wire separate districts for both streetlights and structure lights. Perhaps one could have the structure lights on in Paris but not in the Ukraine.

Wiring presents a particular challenge, now that we’ve decided to go overhead. I can’t see any way around running separate wires for each of the separate circuits, which means those trackside poles will be carrying a bit of weight. In Paris it’s not a problem because we’ll be able to wire from building to building, and a spider’s web of overhead wires would actually look authentic. But there will be fourteen wires on the pole leaving Paris…two for the Ukrainian streetlights, two for the Ukrainian structures, two for Kazakhstan, which has no structures planned but may have a couple of lights on the bridge, two for the Western China structures, two more for the Western China streetlights, and four more, two each for the Peking structures and streetlights. I’m not certain that’s going to work….if we wired each streetlight and structure to a common ground, that would eliminate six of the lines…that’s a little better! That’s going to take some sharp pencil work to get that one right.

I’ve been working on a preliminary plan for the control panel, too. It will have to be either portable or in a weatherproof box. The more the wiring develops the more I see the need to have the control hard-wired in place. Maybe we can fit it in a big Tupperware box of some sort.

OOPS! The Wonder Dog is chasing the cat! He’s smart, I tell you, he just has a lot to learn. I’m certain that cat’s going to teach him something here in a second! I better step in!

You know how I keep emphasizing that garden railroading is real railroading. Well, I realized today that we are at one of those junctures where we have to think real-world.

As you’ve seen, I’ve now become a maniac for streetlights – streetlights and house lights. I hit upon this groovy idea to install “power nexus” locations…”Power Nexus”: pretty good, huh?

For those of you who aren’t inside my head, here’s what I mean; wiring in parallel means you can connect light systems over vast distances by installing connection terminals at strategic locations. Those terminals serve as hubs that support a flock of local lights. We’re calling each hub a nexus. Does it make sense?

So, here’s my thought;

We start with the transformer stationed just north of Paris. Main AC feeds supply power to the Parisian Nexus, a pair of terminals to which all the lights of Paris are connected, and to which a pair of power leads are connected, too. These power leads travel south and into the Ukrainian station, where there are two more terminals. This is the Ukrainian Nexus, to which are attached the Ukrainian lights and the power leads that pass through Kazakhstan and into the China House in western China. Here we find the Western China Nexus that supplies power to the China House, the Hilltop Castle and the China Bridge. In fact the power leads coming out of the Western China Nexus travel underneath the China Bridge and on to the Peking Station Nexus, last stop for the electrical system. This last nexus supplies electricity for the station, the China Trestle, and the streetlights along Chung King Road.

What do you think? Pretty comprehensive, huh? Just like that I’ve got a power grid designed along with a name for that stupid concrete road I poured a month ago. Chunk King Road is the name of the main drag in the Chinatown in Los Angeles. Just look at the stuff you learn by reading my posts!

Here’s where the garden railroad and real life converge: how do we transmit the power from one nexus to the next? In my head I pictured cheap extension cords from the 99 Cent Store, and that will work well from the Ukrainian Section through Kazakhstan and into Western China.

But my railroad features those “ornate” stone columns. Getting a power line past them looks bad no matter how you slice it.

Here are the three options:
1. Extension cords hidden in the scenery. This is the easiest way to do it, but has the burden of being ugly where exposed.
2. Extension cords buried wherever possible. This is a useful option except when The Idiot attacks and digs ‘em up. Plus, an Edison guy told me that underground cable it twice as deadly for line crews as overhead lines. Not that it’s a concern in the backyard, but still…
3. This is my favorite: overhead power lines, just like real life. I’m not sure what gauge of wire to use, and I’m certain The Idiot will blow ‘em up, but how cool would it be to have real working power lines? Man, you could spot a problem in the blink of an eye! You want to drop a feed to a new building? Piece of cake! This is the most difficult, and most time consuming, but also the most realistic.

What do you think? It would be a pain in the keester to build all those power poles…how far apart do you space ‘em? But wouldn’t that be way cool?

What would they do in real life? Well, they wouldn’t string mondo cables along the ground and hide ‘em in the bushes, I can tell you that!

Be gone, o Darkness! Stay back, ye night! The wizardry of electrical lights has come to the Ukraine!

Okay, so I have to admit I had two really big surprises on this streetlight project; the first was when I nearly electrocuted myself, the second came when I actually shot the picture above. More on that in a moment.

Just for giggles and grins I decided to try my hand at building streetlights. I had been thinking about the railway and how forlorn the China Section looked after the attack by the rabid idiot. I was really tired, and it was really hot, and I just plain didn’t feel like doing the many, many chores I had to do around here.

The upright, or standard as we say in the lighting biz, is an eight inch long piece of 1/4″x 1/4″ wood I bought at Michael’s some time ago for the combine project, which, by the way, has yet to see the light of day. I made the two inch long arm out of the same wood. I drilled a nice hole through the back of the light post and into the end of the arm and then drove a ½ inch nail in there, gluing the two pieces together with Plumber’s Goop first. Then I laid the thing down and cut a brace out of a coffee stir stick. I applied it with the same combo of ½ inch nail and Plumber’s Goop, making sure to drill pilot holes for the nails and cutting the nails in half so they wouldn’t poke through the other side of the pole. Found that out the hard way on the first nail. Oops.

As you may recall (bless you if you do!), I wrote a post back in early July about cutting up cheapo Christmas light sets to use them on the garden railway. I had a mangled set that I had used for that article still kicking around, and I cut a bulb and socket combo out of it, making sure I had at least ten inches of wire dangling off the end.

Getting the light socket onto the arm proved a little more difficult. I drilled a little hole in the back edge of the socket and matched it with a little hole drilled vertically through the end of the arm, planning to stick a small screw in there. Two problems: no little screw, and what the heck to do with the stiff wires coming out of the back of the socket. It occurred to me to try and stuff one of the wires through the little hole I’d drilled. The wire obviously wouldn’t fit through the hole, so I drilled it out to a larger diameter, and, while I was at it, drilled a second hole just inboard from the first for the other wire. With the wires poked through the two holes the socket snugged nicely up against the end of the arm. Voila!

I grabbed a coil of wire from my garage workshop, planning to make a nice little wrap around the wire and the arm to hold the wire down and make it look nice. It turned out to be 18 gauge wire…sonny, you aint gonna wrap that around a 1/4 x 1/4 square and have it look any good at all!

In messing with the wire I found that I could make a pretty good staple by bending it in a “c” shape around the jaw of my needle nose pliers and whacking it with a hammer. The staple straddles the wire and clamps into the wood…very nice! I did one of those on top of the arm and then ran the wires down the back of the post, stapling them about every inch of the way.

I cut the lampshade from a Safeway Black Cherry soda can, using a Dremel metal-cutting blade as a circle template. I marked the center and cut a ¼ inch hole in it and cut along the radius from there to the outside edge. The shade fit around the bulb but was flat, so I drew one edge of the shade over the other to lend an angle to it. It looked pretty good. I glued it together with Plumber’s Goop, but cut just the tiniest tab in the overlapping section and folded it over to keep the glued pieces from shifting.

Well, it looked like heck. Blonde wood, white wires held down with silver staples, and pictures of cherries on the lampshade! A quick blast from the Rust-Oleum brown can and, voila, a streetlight!

“Are you sure you want to do that?” my older daughter asked, watching me wire the streetlight into the mangled Christmas light set.

“It’ll be fine…I know what I’m doing.” Poor daddy, dumb as a doorknob.

My mother-in-law and wife were in the kitchen when I plugged it in.

ZZZZZZZZZ-PAP!

I jerked the plug out the wall, watching the blue spark follow the plug! The bulb was all silver inside. My wife giggled while my mother-in-law stared at me in horror. Maybe that light set has just a little too much manglement in it after all!

A big screw holds the streetlight, with its new bulb, firmly to the station platform. Two smaller holes allow the wires to drop through the platform without fuss. I wired the light to the AC side of the LGB transformer because I wasn’t sure how it would work on the DC side. I gently turned the power up. It worked just fine.

My wife and I took our younger daughter down to the Griffith Park Observatory this afternoon. Although an excellent place, it was hotter than a two dollar pistol, and it was dark by the time we got home. I rushed outside to snap the picture above, but had put the transformer away. Fumbling in the dark with a flashlight and recalcitrant wires, I was certain I wired the streetlight to the AC side. I was quite surprised to see the light wink on when I plugged the transformer in! I looked at the transformer – I had wired the light to the DC side. You can see the nice amber glow in the picture above.

So, what did I learn? Cheapo Christmas light sets are a great source for light sockets and bulbs and wiring, but shouldn’t be used as the source for power. You can wire ‘em right to the DC terminal and not worry about a thing. I imagine one could wire a bunch of them in parallel and be just fine – again, that nice amber glow is great!

Darkness be gone! Streetlight(s) have finally come to the Paris to Peking Railway! Huzzah!