Poolside Rails

“Now, I won’t hear of it!” roars the CEO. He’s generally an easy going fellow, but this topic has him ready for a fight.

“I’m just saying…” Bill Dimcheap, the Chief Architect starts.

“Oh, I know what you’re saying,” the CEO cuts him off. “And I don’t like it! Not a word of it, sir, not a word!”

“Here, noo,” the Chief Engineer of the Paris to Peking Railway enters the American Suite in the Hotel d’Americain in Paris. “What is all this yellin’ aboot?”

“It’s juicy,” the PR guy says.

“It’s noisy,” the CFO mutters into his scotch.

“Who hired this poltroon?” roars the CEO. “Who in heaven’s name put HIM on the team?”

“Uh, you did, chief,” the CEO guys says, sheepishly.

“I’m just saying…” the Chief Architect starts again.

“I KNOW what you’re SAYING,” the CEO seethes with anger. “I just don’t want to HEAR it!”

“Let the man talk,” the Chief Engineer sits down with his first stout of the evening. “Go ahead, laddie, I’ll hear you out.”

“I’m suggesting we convert the railway to HO scale,” the Chief Architect says quickly.

Stout sprays across the table.

“WHAT?!?” roars the Chief Engineer. “Have ye gone DAFT?”

“My sentiments exactly,” nods the scarlet-faced CEO.

“There’s a good angle here, chief,” the PR Guy says. Bill Dimcheap nods briskly. “Any Joe can have a garden railway in G scale…but how many HO scale outdoor railways have you heard of?”

Bill jumps to his feet.

“Consider this,” he says, pointing at the Chief Engineer. “You get 4.83 times as much track in the same space…that means a parallel main line, and turnouts, and long trains, and everything is standard gauge…”

“Unless you build a narrow gauge subline,” adds the PR Guy.

“Are ye crazy? We dunna have the rolling stock for HO!”

“The rolling stock is cheap!” roars the Chief Architect. “You can pick up half a dozen HO flatcars for the price of a single G gauge car.”

“I like the sound of that,” nods the surly CFO.

“Aye,” smirks the Chief Engineer, “and ye can have me mother’s bloomers for the price of half a can of stout…that don’t prove nothin’. What’ll ye do for motive power, seeing as how there ain’t no way I’m going to be approving of electrifying that much rail in an outdoor settin’? What’ll ye do,” he chuckles, “convert it to batteries? In wee little HO?”

“Why not?” suddenly Bill Dimcheap isn’t bold and strident anymore. He’s calm, and rational. He’s speaking softly. “Why not? We’re limited to this single battery-powered locomotive in G scale unless we make some conversions – why not do ‘em in HO? The per-unit cost of an HO locomotive is nothing compared to a G scale, you can get an accurate profile locomotive for just a few bucks, the cars are cheaper, and, for the price of the rail needed to repair the Parisian line in G scale, you could re-track the entire railway. And don’t get me started on off-the-shelf building components!”

The room is silent for a very long moment.

“But,” the CEO says, tentatively, “nobody’s done it in HO…”

“Why not be among the first?” asks the PR Guy. “That’s good press right there. I can hardly wait to get started on a new press kit!”

“Could be a good source of revenue,” the CFO says. “We need that. A lot of that. Any of that.”

The room is silent again. Many minutes pass as each board member considers the obstacles and challenges.

The CEO rises, slowly.

“Gentlemen, we shall have to consider this thing. At first I was dead set against it. Now…” he looks around the room. “Meeting adjourned…but let us think on this thing, shall we?”

There’s a reason why people do what they do. Musicians are generally gifted or talented in music, painters in painting, dancers in dancing, and architects in, well, architecting.

They say it never rains in California, but, man it pours. We’ve seen a long series of storms, each slamming in on a weekend…and I’m talking rain, here, buckets and gallons and other large volumes. We’re in the middle of a whopper El Nino, a drought-ending series of powerful winter downpours.

But the rain falls on the weekends. And I don’t get home from my job at the Evil Empire until after the sun, she sets. These two facts together mean that the railroad projects have moved indoors.

Last year I discovered Google SketchUp and used it to create a pretty nifty track plan. This time, due to darkness and dampness, I decided it’s time to lay out a plan for Paris.

Now, my plan is not done yet, but, seriously, I’ve got about eight hours into this design. There are roads lined out, and I have a general idea of where the buildings will be.

But the problem is with SketchUp. Oh, the program runs great, and it’s easy and fun and all that. The problem is that it’s easy and fun and all that! The program allows you to add all sorts of detail, and that’s the danger! Look at that big building with all those angled roof panels: I spent a good two hours on those windows! You can actually make each pane of glass in the windows transparent…but you have to click on each individual pane on each window to make it so…that’s a lot of clicking!

As you can see, the large three-storied building across the street has yet to be detailed. It is, in fact, in the wrong place as there appears to be no sidewalk. That means the building’s depth will go down, which means I’ll probably just delete it and start over.

Now, about those columns: they sure are ghastly! Perhaps a building-front skin will hide some of the river rocks from which they are made.

The station itself will stretch between the two columns. It will be backed against the fence, with the platform stretching out to the rails.

But, finishing the plan for the station, while critical to the overall success of the railway, requires more hours on the SketchUp. More hours!

In making the plan, it’s easy to get lost in creating a virtual layout…my brother and I said almost the same thing at the same time: who needs to build it if you can lay it out on a computer?

Because Garden Railroading is Real Railroading, that’s why, or, uh, who. We’re modelers, aren’t we? We build, don’t we? Do we plan? Heck no! I mean, yes, but not for the sake of planning, but for the sake of building! That’s why dancers dance and painters paint – because we’re builders! BUILDERS UNITE!

That being said, I’m going back to SketchUp and finish my plan. Because I’m a builder! And we’ll always have Paris, sweetheart.

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?

We’ve done a lot of track designing in Google SketchUp. Beyond the obvious advantage of being free, the 3D modeling software features a huge suite of tools to help you design structures. My wife and I were looking at plants today (landscaping…Hooray!), and she asked that I firmly identify what I wanted to build where so she would know what to plant.

I thought about it for awhile, and realized that I didn’t really know what I wanted in the China Section of the P-P Ry. I reviewed my DVD of Dreamworks’ Kung Fu Panda (which, if you still haven’t seen it, I just have to tell you you’re missing something special!), and found a PDF of a Chinese Pagoda diorama you could build. Well, that got me thinking, and I turned back to our old friend, Google SkethUp.

You can download the program for free by visiting http://sketchup.google.com. Be prepared to be amazed by what you find there. The breadth of the tools available, and therefore the number of applications for this software, is breathtaking.

So, download it, install it, and check with me when you’re done. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

Ready?

When you first open the software, you get a picture of a guy standing at the nexus of three colored lines. If you click on the guy and press DELETE he won’t bother you any more.

The Red line represents Width, the Green is Height, and the Blue is depth.

Up along the top there you’ll see a variety of tools. The program should start with the Pencil selected. If it doesn’t, select it by clicking on it. Now click on the nexus point, and drag your mouse along the Red line. In the lower right you’ll see the length of the line you’re drawing extend as you move the mouse.

If the dimensions are too large, say it’s drawing in feet when you want to draw in inches, click on the Magnifying Glass in the toolbar at the top of the screen. Pushing up on the drawing zooms you in, while pulling down zooms you out. When you’re zoomed in close enough, click on the pencil and you’re back in business.

Drawing a line begins and ends with a mouse click. Draw your next line at the end of your first, moving the mouse straight up. You’ll see that your line turns green, indicating you’re following the Green axis. Click to finish that line. Now draw a line on the Green axis starting from the other end of your first line. See how SketchUp automatically squares up your corners when you get to the same length as the second line? It makes it very easy to draw a box. When you’ve clicked on the end of your third line, click again and complete the rectangle by going back along the Red axis and connecting the tops of your two Green axis lines.

Your rectangle should automatically fill in.

If it doesn’t, one of your lines doesn’t lie along the Green axis. It’s hard to see in the 2D view. Click on the picture of the earth with arrows around it – the Orbit button. The cool thing about modeling in 3D is that you can move the drawing around however you like, and look at it from multiple sides. When you find your misaligned line, click on the Select Arrow at the upper left of the toolbar. Next, click on your bad line, and it will turn blue. Press DELETE and it will go away so that you can draw the line correctly.

There is an interesting feature called “Push/Pull” that will save you a lot of time. Once you have a filled-in rectangle, click on the Orbit button and tilt the drawing slightly down, so that you have a slight perspective on it. Now click on the orange icon that looks like a rubber stamp, and then click on your rectangle. Your filled in area becomes filled with little dots. Now, slide the mouse along the Blue axis…your rectangle becomes a box!

That’s all there is to basic SketchUp manipulation. There are a gazillion other tools, and you’ll get to ‘em as you progress with your drawing. I included a sketch of a shed I built in my backyard based on a SketchUp design…the real deal turned out pretty darned close.

When I’ve got my Chinese structures designed I’ll share ‘em with you. I also have some plant information that you will definitely want to look at…shall we say tomorrow night?

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…

No matter how much electricity or landscaping or beautiful bridge building or clever track planning I do, there seems to be one major issue on my garden railway: a major bump in the roadbed.

In my China Section the wife of the railway’s previous owner planted a darling ficus tree. It was very picturesque, growing as it did alongside the quaint waterfall next to the tracks. I imagine it looked really neat back there in year one, and two, and maybe even three. The tree looked nice when I bought the house a decade ago, but I noticed that there was a bump in the rails even then. Try as I might, I couldn’t get the track to lay flat.

If you haven’t see that History Channel show Life After People, you’re missing out on very real lessons. I didn’t pay attention to my ficus tree much, until that awful day when the roadbed lifted and the rails disconnected. THEN I noticed! Just like in Life After People, the tree’s roots had caught the edges of the concrete roadbed from above and below and lifted it out of the ground. It’s really creepy…just like the TV show! “Ten years after people, the ficus roots have grabbed the roadbed and broken the rails…”

Anyway, that’s what happened. I’ve wanted to focus on all the fun stuff, the creative stuff, but it is all for naught if the trains don’t run.

So, we have to fix that bump. As you’ll see in the top picture, it’s major. No amount of flexing or pushing will get those rails to match up because the roadbed beneath them is broken, and one portion is rising.

I probed the area with a variety of tools, ultimately settling on a hatchet as the weapon…I mean tool…of choice. Back to that theme of Garden Railroading being Real Railroading: tell me the number of times you’ve taken a hatchet to your benchwork!

What I found was a mass of rubbery brown roots passing under the concrete roadbed, itself about three inches thick. As I had surmised, the roadbed had cracked in two places, once over the roots and again about three feet up the line towards the turnout.

I decided to try and cut the roots away from both sides of the roadbed. My idea was to isolate the roots underneath and pull them out by hand. I loosened the dirt, and could feel the tops of the roots with my fingers. So, what the heck, I decided to bring in a chainsaw and use its tip to cut through them.

A note about chainsaws: NOT FOR PLOWING! Chainsaws like to pull and grab when you stick ‘em into the ground. They’ll cut wood just fine, but they kick up dirt and rocks and all manner of debris. Yes, I got through the root, and no, I won’t do that again!

The concrete had cracked and broken in several places, and was now in the way of ever joining those rails again. So, having removed the root, I now decided to remove the concrete.

Last fall I bought myself an “engineer’s hammer”, which is a nice name for a four-pound sledge. Boy, is that thing fun to use! BOOM! Goodbye, concrete. The late Michael Jackson had that song “Beat it”, and I’m telling you, there’s no finer tool than a four-pound sledge for that! BOOM!

As you can see from the lower picture, I’m mostly all of the way through the concrete demolition phase. That flatcar, with a car on it, is acting as a weight, slowing bending the rails back down. It’s just an idea, but I think it’ll work. When it’s done it little job, I should be able to reconnect the rails with conventional joiners.

Now, what do I put in there in place of the concrete?

No matter how carefully you plan youi always find something you had missed. I was so concerned about getting that mountain sculpted in 3D and that concrete poured I forgot about a critical element: electricity.

The motive power (with a nod to Ayn Rand) on the Paris to Shanghai Railway will be of the battery driven variety. I like the independence of the locomotives and frankly can’t afford DCC. There’s a great idea in Kalmbach’s Garden Railways Tips & Tricks for your garden railway(it comes as part of your subscription to Garden Railways Magazine (www.trains.com)) about adapting remote controls from cheap RC cars to run trains that I thought was quite worthwhile. I’ll let you know how it works out as soon as I get to that part of the adventure.

We can avoid transformer issues by not having to electrify the rails, which will make wiring simpler. Another trick (or is it a tip?) in the Kalmbach book is to raid miniature Christmas light sets for bulbs. I’m wondering why we should stop at just bulbs. I’m thinking we should go all out, sockets and all. Running my city lights down conventional AC power cords will be inexpensive and robust at the same time. And, like the DC transformer we have avoided by going AC, we can dim the lights using simple AC dimmers. Here’s the pun: brilliant thinking!

My plan is to raid the 99¢ Store for 35-bulb light sets and extension cords. Simple PVC pipe of the black sewer variety can serve as conduit, and will run through the landscaping at the edge of the roadbed. I can run it under the road bridge in the China section, effectively crossing the track with power.

I’m terribly tempted to run the wires above ground on power poles along the right of way. It would look like telegraph lines. But we’ve acquired two canine-based railway destruction units, and I’m certain an overhead wiring system would provide an irresistible target. And, you’re talking AC, the real deal, not some wimpy DC power pack. Cross those lines and you could have a shocking experience! (Well, of course I’ll plug it into a GFI, but you shouldn’t take chances!)

I imagine you can cut sockets out of the Christmas light set to reduce the number of lights on a strand…it will be nice to have lights in my Chinese railroad station, but not 35 of ‘em! The nice thing about 99¢ light sets is that you can experiment heavily on the cheap.

Each building will get its own light set, and will connect to extension cords cut and wired end-to-end to run down the conduit. The light-set-to-extension-cord-head junction will occur in a cleverly landscaped styrene box. That way the connection will be available but hidden.

All of this clever disguising in the landscape will only be required in China, where electrical wires would seem out of place in 1910. China is the part of the railway most exposed to canine intrusion, too. When we get to Paris, I believe we’ll see lots of exposed wire. Turn of the 20th Century cities flirted with electricity so strongly that they didn’t worry about the aesthetics of exposed wires.

So, the plans change again! I do believe we’ll begin planting plants in the next day or so. Dog number two (he has no name yet except #14, as that was his cage number at the pound) is arriving tomorrow, providing his surgery went okay today. But Tuesday, maybe Wednesday, we’ll be picking up the ground cover to secure my hillsides.

What if you had a massive, 108 foot wide canyon to cross with your railway and timber was in short supply, but bamboo was plentiful? Well, you know that bamboo can be remarkably strong, with a tensile strength greater than steel, and, as you are the chief construction engineer with the French railway company building the trestle, you know that in China, bamboo is the traditional building material of choice. So, you decide to build your bridge out of bamboo.

You are in China, so you consult with the local Chinese authorities on building the bridge. After all, they are, in this year of 1901, the absolute authorities on building with bamboo. They help you sketch out a plan that takes advantage of bamboo’s awesome strength and natural beauty.

Well, I didn’t have any Chinese authorities with which to consult, but I came up with this plan nonetheless. And I’m not French, either. But the bridge design is graceful, to scale, and can be built from bamboo. It will be a stunner when finished.

Although in the 1/1 scale world, bamboo is one of the fastest growing plants on the planet, with some varieties growing as fast as a meter a day, and is incredibly plentiful, I don’t have ready access to a good supply. What I do have is a good supply of soda straws. Yes, soda straws. You can’t beat them for price, or for versatility. And darn if they don’t look like 1/18th scale bamboo!

So, here we are in the China section, tasked with building our chasm-spanner out of soda-straw bamboo. I tried out a small section, just to see what would happen. It looks pretty good!

Here’s how we’ll build the bridge: Two sheets of plywood, cut to the shape required in the plan, separated by a 2×4 which serves as the roadbed. We’ll plate the roadbed with craft sticks, cut to shape of course. They’ll represent bamboo boards. And we’ll use popsicle sticks to line the inside of those arches.

To make the bridge look as if it’s made of bamboo, we’ll coat the plywood sheet with epoxy and embed the soda straws, plastic, not paper, and straight, none of that bendy stuff. The straws will stay stuck in the epoxy, and the epoxy will waterproof the outside of the bridge. We’ll shellac the crackers out of the entire assembly, of course, as a measure of weatherproofing.

In the sample I built, I painted the front of the assembly with Rust-Oleum flat white. My goal was to provide a uniform base color and give my cheapo acrylic paints a tooth-some surface on which to cling. You know, of course, that acrylic won’t stick to hydrophilic surfaces like smooth plastic, so you have to add a base coat of some etching paint. Rust-Oleum works great.

Using what I had on hand, I flowed watered-down flat Espresso colored acrylic paint between the straws, then washed the whole thing in watered-down flat Ivory acrylic. The two colors blended nicely, and the Ivory adds enough of a yellow tinge to look fairly realistic. To really push the detail, we’ll paint little bands of brown to simulate the joints in the bamboo. In the real deal, of course, we’ll need to use an oil based paint for the colors, as the acrylic won’t hold up under the weather.

I haven’t priced out scale bamboo yet, but it can hardly be as cheap as a box of a 1000 soda straws from Smart & Final and a tube of epoxy. Plywood is cheap, and I have a gazillion popsicle sticks on hand from a dozen other projects. All I need is a fresh 2×4 and I’m on my way…in fact, the piece cut off from an eight foot length can serve as internal blocks to support the bottoms of the arches…better yet!

So, there it is: an inexpensive bridge that should look like a million bucks when it’s done. Now, it’s finding the cheap labor to actually build it…

I’ve been thinking a lot about bridges lately. The China Station end of my garden railway requires three of them, and they are puzzling in the extreme.

The first bridge is already in place, and is rather more like a tunnel. As you’ll recall, the railway is set on a concrete roadbed that is a good six inches thick. I knocked out a section near the apex of the southern turn to provide for drainage from the mountain I had created. The drainage hole was big enough to qualify as a tunnel, and actually now fits thematically with the railroad. It looks rough and simple, much as you’d expect a simple Chinese tunnel to appear at the turn of the twentieth century. That part’s okay, and looks pretty good. But what kind of support would you see on the rail bed itself? Do you suppose there would be handrails along the side?

The second bridge is a road bridge. As motorcars have not yet appeared in China’s countryside, this bridge can be rather simple. Still, it requires a degree of architectural styling to fit the theme. The middle picture is what I have in mind. There’s a great series of articles in Garden Railways Magazine by Ray R. Dunakin III about building real rock retaining walls (look for it at www.trains.com). He built a stunning arch out of natural stones that would look great down there as the road bridge.

The problem is that third bridge. It’s a trestle, six feet in length. As you can see from the bottom picture, it’s quite a piece of crummy work. Don’t get me wrong, it looks good from three feet away. My brother’s a fan of “three foot modeling”…if it looks good from three feet away, that’s all that matters. But the guy who put it together didn’t model a bridge, he just built one. The difference is that it lacks detail, and therefore erodes any sense of accuracy or realism in that part of the railway. It stretches for six feet, which is 108 feet in 1/18th scale, but has no supports underneath. It’s a major bridge, but the modeler before me simply tossed in a cool looking toy bridge.

So, here’s the challenge: Imagine a 108’ long trestle over a rocky gorge. Now picture that it’s for a narrow gauge railway. NOW picture that it is built in China in the late 1800’s. The railway, we assume, is a European, probably French concern, as one end of the line terminates in Paris. If I were the French builders, I would probably use steel arches over the rocks.

But this is another place where garden railroading and reality part ways. The bridge is a major scenic element in the China section of the railway. That bridge has to “look” Chinese. Perhaps I’ll build it out of bamboo rather than steel.

I shouldn’t admit this, but I’m using the Dreamworks movie “Kung Fu Panda” for my research into Chinese architecture. If you haven’t seen the movie you are truly missing something great. The artwork alone is stunning, and perfectly depicts not just a small Chinese village but a huge palace. But I didn’t spot any massive railroad trestles in it…darn!