Poolside Rails

Okay, well, maybe it’s not a tragedy per se, but it’s a great picture, huh?

Today is very first day of January in the Year ’10, and my wife and my littlest one went down to Pasadena to watch the Rose Parade. Unlike the gazillions of people who brave the predawn hours and freezing cold to be the first to sit on the coooollllldddd concrete sidewalks and gawk and stare at the floats, we usually leave our home in Ventura at a respectable 8:30 in the morning. It takes a little over an hour to get to Pasadena from here, but the Rose Parade moves very slowly. By the time we get to our spot, which is about two miles from where the parade starts, it’s about 10:00, and the parade is just arriving! The crowds are thinner, the parade is still going, and everybody’s happy. Except this time, when we left a little bit late, and the offramp we always use was closed! We missed about half the parade…believe me, the parade is very cool to watch, but a little of it goes a long way, so no hearts were broken.

Anyway, we didn’t get home until late this afternoon. It being the very beginning of a new year, I decided to try the Bachmann Not-So-Big-Hauler in the China Section. The rails are a little dirty what with the plantings and the rain, but a quick skaboodle with a paintbrush at least got the leaves off of ‘em!

But the China Turnout proved to be a major challenge.

As you may have read in a previous post, the coupler on the aft end of the Bachmann NSBH (Not-So-Big Hauler) isn’t  a coupler at all but a down-pointing hook which lies too close to the locomotive for the LGB passenger cars’ loop coupler to attach. To fix it, just for today’s run, I used a piece of wire, tied around the LGB’s coupler and formed into a loop for the NSBH’s hook. It worked okay going forward, but going backwards, of course, the wire collapsed…rather like pushing a rope, I’m afraid.

The wire was still acceptable until we reached the China Turnout.  The Troublesome Truck, the red coach, popped over the frog in the turnout and rolled off the rails.  Now, it could have just slipped off the rails and stopped. That would be a nice thing to do. No sir, that didn’t happen. It slipped off the rails all right, but then it rocked from side to side and pitched itself off the raised railway and down the 3 or so feet to the stone walkway below. Kapow!

The problem with the turnout, which I cleaned thoroughly with a paintbrush, turned out to be dirt. Not between the rails, mind you, but underneath, outside the rails, where the actuator bar travels. Dirt built up under there and counter-acted the spring in the switch mechanism, leaving the closure rail just about 1/64 of an inch open…just enough to pop the LGB off the tracks!

Well, no harm done, really, beyond a significant increase in the engineer’s blood pressure and a hint of blue air from all of the French Invective released by yours truly.

After a good little digging with the back end of the paintbrush the problem was cleared up. As you can see, the LGB coaches and the NSBH made it safely across the China Bridge safely.

See? What’s a new year without a little tragedy, a little swearing, and a happy resolution?

Happy New Year to You! I hope all your tragedies are little, and can be resolved with the back end of a paintbrush!

After a lot of researching and head-scratching, we have finally struck upon the answer of how the return switches were wired by the previous administration!

“I’m sorry, but what did he say? He lost me at that vulgar ‘head-scratching’ thing,” mutters the CEO, taking a sip on his brandy.

“We’ll be sure to leave that head-scratching part out when we report it to the papers. It sounds like a reference to lice,” replies the PR Guy, quickly taking notes.

“When you chuckle-heads arre quite thrrough,” rumbles the Chief Engineer over his stout, “I believe this is crrit-ickle information!”

Many months ago, back when I was philosophizing about ways to overcome the polarity issues, I had joked that maybe the way to accomplish it was to simply hardwire the turnouts so that trains can only go one way through them.

The problem, you see, is that the Paris to Peking Railway is a long dogbone-style layout. The train starts in Paris, passes through the Paris Turnout and heads south on the main line through the Ukraine and crosses a bridge at Kazakhstan, then passes through a second turnout, this one in China. The China Turnout sends the train around the China Section, which is really just an oblong loop. At the end of the loop the train comes back through the China Turnout again before heading north toward Paris. The Paris Turnout sends the train around the Parisian Loop before admitting it back onto the main line for its southern journey. You get the drift?

Heading south, the right rail on the main line is, for giggles and grins, the positive rail. If we head straight through the China Turnout, the right rail remains positive all the way around the China Bend until we approach the same China Turnout from the other side. The China Turnout admits the train back onto the main line in the opposite direction. The right rail should be positive, but now we’re heading north, and  that rail was negative when we were heading south. See the problem?

The way to fix the problem is to have a switchlike doohickey that flips the polarity on the main line based on the location of the train. LGB makes just such a doohickey.  It senses the presence of a train passing over it and flips the main line polarity. If you had two such doohickies, you could, in fact, complete a loop without touching the polarity on the main line yourself.

Well, after some digging around, it turns out that the previous administration had mounted exactly two such doohickies on the Paris to Peking main line, about a foot inside either loop from the turnouts.  These guys are LGB 1015 K and U units, and the switches are mounted on the main line inside the loops, while the sensors are mounted on the other part of the wye in turnout.

To make ‘em work, however, the train must always travel down the wye of the turnout to trip the sensor. A train traveling through the turnout on the main line passes  the doohickey but not the sensor, so that when it travels down the wye and through the turnout, the main line is set in the wrong polarity.

So, that’s great news!  The LGB engine is now officially able to make a circumnavigational journey of the Paris to Peking Railway!

That is, of course, when I finally get my hands on some straight rails for the Paris Loop.

“I’m not sure I understand all this polarity jibber jabber,” says the CEO after his fourth brandy.

“You dunna need to,” says the Chief Engineer. “’at’s my job.”

“All we need to know is that track electrification issues have all been solved,” says the CFO. “Now, if we can just get more track!

It’s no secret that I have a black thumb. I actually killed a geranium plant, and you’re not supposed to be able to kill those. In fact, it was the death of that fine looking geranium that got me banned from any manner of plant pruning here at the Turner house. My wife glares at me when I pick up the hedge clippers.

“Where are you going with those?”

“Just to trim some bushes…”

“Uh huh. Let me do that for you.”

That’s the reason I haven’t planted plants along the top of the China Mountain: clipper shock.

I was discussing the lack of plantage along the top of the hill with the Maintenance Operations Manager, or MOM, as my daughter calls her, just the other day. She suggested two things that I thought were terrific ideas.

The first was to draft up a landscaping plan to give her an idea of what to plant where. I drew my plan in MS Paint because I’m absolutely terrible at drawing curves in real life. Well, that and I’m lazy. The plan shows the shape of the China Loop with reasonable accuracy, and, when compared with the topography, should make it rather clear what to plant where.

I must point out that the word China goes really good in front of almost anything. You’ve got your China plates, of course, but here on the Paris to Peking Railway we have the China Section, the China House, the China Bridge, the Western China Turnout (I’m particularly fond of that one), the China Mountain, and the China Loop. West of the China Bridge is that much larger mountain which we shall call Magic Mountain just for giggles and grins. Anyway, things just sound more official and mysterious with the word China in front of them. I have yet to call myself China Bill, but I’m thinking about it!

Idea number two is rather novel, but it makes a lot of sense. As you know, Zorro the Wonder Dog (we wonder what he’s going to wreck next) is a major nuisance down there in the China Section (see what I mean about that China thing? Sounds cool, huh?). He’s not a digger, as I’d feared, but a jumper. His favorite place to jump is right up there to the top of the China Mountain. I had hoped that planting the Mountain would discourage him, but my wife doesn’t think so.

Her suggestion is to build a curving screen that is perhaps three feet high that fits around the outside brickwork of the China Loop. Such a screen will discourage Wonder Dog from jumping over it. He will, of course, find a way to scale Magic Mountain, but we can at least ease the pressure on the China Mountain.

My idea…I’m particularly brilliant at these things, you know…was to cut the screen in the shapes of trees. Painted a nice forest green, perhaps with detailing, the screen would provide a nice view break when seen from the railroad side, and give the shorter viewer the illusion of looking through a forest when seen from the outside. I drafted a very, very rough plan in MS Paint just to give you an idea of what we’re talking about. Pretty cool, huh? The screen will be movable to provide access to the railway, but will spend most of its days in place around the curve. I think it’s an excellent idea. And my rendering of it is, of course, brilliant.

So, what have we got? Well, now we have a landscaping plan. Maybe, with plan in hand, we’ll see some plants actually hit the ground this weekend. Maybe.

And, as the fabled dumpster has not yet arrived, I have a supply of plywood, although it’s naily, nasty stuff with a gazillion splinters. A quick cut with the jigsaw of death, a little sandpaper, a nice heavy coat of Rust-Oleum Forest Green, and, voila, an innovative Wonder-Dog-Blocker. Oh yeah, it has to be curved. Well, back to the drawing board!

If you’ve been following along, you know that Paris has been abandoned. No, not the one in France, or the one in California (that’s spelled Perris), or the one in Texas…the one in my backyard! Yes, the first half of the Paris-to-Peking Railway has been something of a ghost town since day one…so much so that there’s not even a town!

Through aggressive scrubbing and sweeping and the frightful expenditure of energy we’ve gotten a trainload of track and accessories all the way down the Main Line, through the Paris Turnout, and all the way to the head of the Parisian Loop…why, that must a distance of, what, four feet? Try six, smarty pants!

A veritable treasure trove of discoveries seems to be waiting underneath the Creeping Charlie breeding grounds that once was a railway. interesting things emerge as work crews crack away at the underbrush. The ganglia of wire is far and away the most fascinating.

This is something I will never understand in a million years: we have two dogs now, one who is mild mannered and very smart, and another that, well, calling him an idiot is an insult to the idiots of the world. How that dog targets my rails with his…well, you know, his defecatory offerings…is beyond me. And he hits those garden railway rails square, making sure to cover them both. Cleaning the rails becomes a chore of scraping that off, too. The other dog, Gillmore, has a nice little spot in the yard where he does his business. Not Zorro, though. No sir, where are you running the trains? That’ll do for me!

Anyway, the Parisian Loop seems to have been a favorite location for him. This fact has been yet another discovery we made this week, perhaps less pleasant than its predecessors.

Great news, however! Crews were able to resurrect and repair the Electrical Box discovered on the Abandoned Platform of the Former Station at the apex of the Parisian Loop (phew!). With the help of our cool GE Multimeter, we were able to determine that electricity still flows through the outlets in the box. That’s great news because we’ll soon be able to power the whole shebang from Paris rather than running an extension cord over the now full swimming pool to the other outlet box.

The business with Zorro notwithstanding, I believe I have the consent of all parties to reclaim the Parisian Loop from Mr. Creeping Charlie. This has been something of a task, as, once Charlie took over, the nice, flat railway became a favorite place for placing and watering potted plants.

The Landscaping Manager, however, has come to understand that the nice, flat space is NOT FOR PLANTS!!! Although our discussion ended amicably it was touch and go there for a while!

Now that employment has reared its ugly head, I may soon be able to afford some straight track so that I can repair the east side of the loop.

We’ve gotten a work train onto the west side of the loop, have discovered active electricity in the apex of the loop, and now have the means to acquire track for the east side. Things are hopping, I can tell you.

Now, if I can just keep that dog from hopping!