Poolside Rails

Now, I consider myself a patient man. I don’t mind if Polly Pockets gets wedged in my LGB coaches. I don’t mind removing the occasional dog poo from the railways. I don’t mind moving the flower pots off the track so that I can run the train. I don’t mind those things.  But this, this I mind.

I come home from work and what do I find but downed power lines…not just downed power lines, mind you, because that might be acceptable, but mangled lines and quasi-dug up poles…that I just can’t handle. Why, the paint is scarcely dry on the crummily-painted poles in the first place!

Although we know the attacker is Zorro the Idiot (I used to call him the Idiot,  then changed his name to the Wonder Dog, as in I wonder what he’ll destroy next. Now he’s back to the Idiot),  I don’t believe he acted alone on this caper.

No, let’s take our ultra-cool Ray-Bans off for a moment and analyze the scene CSI-wise. Looking around the Paris Section with a flashlight, the surprise is not what we find, but what we don’t.  The stunning brunette (my wife) looks at me quizzically.

“What’s missing?” she asks, with that raised eyebrow that means she’s thinking I’m an idiot again. She may be right.

“You may have a master’s degree in Russian Literature,” I say, smugly, “but I see no poo up here.”

For effect I swing the beam of the flashlight around the crime scene. There are the downed power lines, all twisted and ruined. There’s the bent power pole, the tipped over trains, the knocked down GI Joe guys. But there is no poo.

“Perhaps he came up here to urinate,” she says, mystified.

Frankly, I love it when she speaks French. But, back to business.  There’s no wet spot. Of course things could have dried up. But I think something else happened.  Someone else is an equal partner in this little tragedy.

I don’t like cats. We have just three of the beasts now, down from a personal high of seven of the urinating, territory-marking, stinking little eating machines. Oh sure, they’re cute when they’re little. All three of our monsters are old people now, easily over a decade.

One of ‘em, Louis by name…that’s Louis, pronounced Loo-wee, as in gooey or pee-you-ee, is a nasty old fellow bequeathed to us by some friends who aren’t any more. Not that they aren’t people any more, but the friendship, strained at its best, has waned away to next to nothingness.

Louis is a nasty old codger, age 14,  who scratches at the bathroom door while I’m shaving in the mornings, preparing to drive the 43 miles to my under-funded job with the Evil Empire. He thinks he scratches at the door, but our former friends had his front paws declawed. Did I mention they were former? Anyway, he makes this pounding noise on the door every blessed morning. Does he want to say good morning? Does he come in to make me feel loved and appreciated? No. He leads me directly to his cat food bowl, which is in a windowsill to keep it away from the Idiot. He likes it when I lift him up there. Yes, your majesty.

Anyway, my firm belief is that King Louis enticed the Idiot to chase him and dashed under the power lines, knowing that Prince Ding-Dong would plunge straight through them. Why? Why would a cat do that?  If you must ask that, you obviously don’t own a cat!

I must seriously rethink this overhead power thing. I really like the look, but obviously so does Louis!

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!

Yes, we have a new format here at Poolside Rails. Yes, it’s taken us a long time to get our act together in reworking the website. Yes, it’s taken me a long time to get another post together. Quit your whining, rub some dirt in it and get back in the game!

Actually, I do apologize for the delay in getting you an update on what’s going on in the garden: trying to get a book published is a major, major time taker!

So, here we are, revisiting the locomotive yet again. I tried to drill out those windows, I swear I did. I got the first window pretty oval-shaped. The problem was that second one, behind the first. I used the same template and everything. But cutting through that plastic was tough, and, as the saying goes, there’s many a slip between the cup and the Lipton’s.

After many efforts and much cutting, I invited my sister the artist to see if she could draft out rounder, better looking ovals, as she was sitting there drinking my tea and doing nothing. She sketched pretty cool looking ovals, but they took up the whole side of the cab.

“You know,” my brother in law said, “if you make big windows like that the engineer’s going to hanging out in the breeze. You really should have smaller windows, maybe three of them, only in the upper half of the cab.”

Three Window Option: Rolling Pawnshop

Well, I’m an open-minded guy. And, as you know, I’m a wizard with those popsicle sticks. My plan was to panel the upper half of the window area with those coffee stir sticks and then cut three windows in that that. But I have to be honest.  Take a look at that “artist’s rendering.”  Yes, it looks early industrial-revolution, but it looks pawn-shoppish to me. Plus, I had so much trouble cutting just two windows, I can’t imagine tackling six! So, three windows are out.
My little girl is seven years old and a kick in the pants. She likes to wake daddy up early on Saturday morning and watch cartoons in bed between him and mommy. Mommy likes to read while daddy likes to snore through the cartoons.

But last Saturday my wife got sick of the commercial drivel (my favorite part, of course) and switched over to PBS just in time for Thomas the Tank Engine. Well, I will always cease snoring for Thomas.

Henry, the big, powerful engine, has tanks on either side of the boiler but rectangular windows on the side of the cab. Thomas has no side windows whatsoever, sporting instead a tall opening between the cab and an aft mounted coal bunker. None of the other locomotives, James, Emily, Scarlowee, had any windows at all. Toby, let’s just say he’s square.

So, enter Plan III, the No-Window Not-So-Big Hauler. I like it. I really do. I can cut that cool curve, I can protect the driver, and I can get it DONE!

Groovy Schwoopie Cab - easier to cut!

There’s a bit of a Catch-22 relative to the tanks to be mounted onto the boiler. I like the idea of using a massive hunka hunka wooden wood to bulk out the tank…I’ll sheath it in sheet plastic to give it a detailable surface. But the upper locomotive is held to the chassis by just two screws, and they are dead center above the two remaining drivers.  Fitting the tanks will occlude the screws, denying access to the engineering staff planning to take the thing apart.

Wireframe shape of the tank

I imagine I’ll have to drill a tunnel in the bottom of the tank to provide access to the screw.  It will just have to show up out there in the open air, for all to see…this cool looking tank with a square little notch out of the bottom of it. Have to work on that one.

Next on the agenda for the locomotive, once the new Windowless Version is complete and the tanks are fitted, is to come up with a remote control mechanism.  I read in the Tips and Tricks for Garden Railways flyer from Kalmbach that cheapo remote contol cars can provide excellent electronics…and you get to choose between 29 and 47 megahertz!

Look, ma, TWO locomotives!

Well, my wife is mad at me because I spent a little too long on the garden railway. I swear, though, it was only because she was working on a project which delayed us from going to Lowe’s to pick up the stuff I needed for the projects I was supposed to be working on. And while I was working on the railway I also opened up and bleached the pool filter…that’s gotta count for something!

So, the Ukrainian Section lights up at night! Two streetlights, one on either end of the station platform, and another light inside the station and one more mysteriously shining from the windows of the farmhouse away down the tracks make the nighttime railway all twinkly and stuff.

Here’s the killer: I didn’t spend a penny. As you’ll recall from previous posts, I stole an idea from Kalmbach’s Tips & Tricks for your garden railway supplement. The idea was to use bulbs and sockets from miniature Christmas light sets as lights for the garden railway. After some trial and error I found some success with them. Kalmbach is right…they work great!

The deal is that miniature Christmas light sets are wired in series – if one burns out the rest go out, too. Modern sets have an additional wire that defeat that problem, but the sets are still wired in series. I was freaked out about that when I started this project. My freaking out increased when I wired just one light bulb directly to the plug of the light set all by itself and plugged it in.

ZZZZZ-POP!

That was the brightest I’ve ever seen one of those miniature light bulbs go…in the half second of its flaming death. It seems that my freaking out was entirely unnecessary. They’re just light sockets and bulbs after all. Two wires, nothing more.

Last week I built that cool streetlight and accidently wired it to the AC terminal of my LGB powerpack (not the DC terminal as previously reported…AC, DC, what’s the diff?). I built another streetlight and tested it on the AC terminal while the first streetlight was working…both worked just fine. Knowing that I could wire two bulbs directly to the AC terminal gave me this wicked idea…what if I had a power distribution system that would provide direct power to all bulbs equally? I think that’s called parallel wiring.

I drove two long wood screws into the underside of the station platform with the intention of using them as terminal posts for the two streetlights. I wrapped the lead wires from the powerpack to the screws, then wired each streetlight to the screws. It worked great…both lamps lit equally when powered by the screw. I tested a third lamp to see if the other two dimmed at all…nosiree Bob, not on my watch. That’s when I got the idea to continue to drive the wood screws through the floor of the station. Doing so tightly holds the wiring underneath the platform…that’s a good thing.

Coolest, though, is that the upper portions of the screws provide equal electrical access to just about anywhere in the Ukrainian Section…farther, in fact. I have a crummy old extension cord from which I cut the head and tail some time ago, expecting to use the wiring for some dopey project. I wired another of the Christmas light bulbs to one end and wrapped the other end around the screws…Dude! Long distance lights!

In theory one could use that extension cord to replicate the screw-terminal dealio in the Ukrainian Station, daisy-chaining lighting systems far into the night.

So, that’s my discovery for the day. Yep, my wife is mad at me…even though I framed in and wallboarded up a wall in my daughter’s closet, it still didn’t outweigh the time on the railway.

This a delicate balancing trick, my friend….delicate! At least I now have lights to see what I’m doing!

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!

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!

I have such a long list of apologies to make, I don’t think I’ll ever get to them all. So, instead, I’ll apologize for missing yesterday’s posts. My nephew dropped in out of the blue and rather absorbed my posting time. Sorry.

Another area of apologies, as long as we’re on a roll, is for the failure to remove the stump. It remains an obstacle for the Paris to Peking Railway, and well, a stump!

My wife and I decided to take our youngest daughter and the dogs to Mt. Pinos, here in Southern California. If you haven’t been, and you most likely haven’t, you will be amazed. The Chumash, the Native American tribe that used to inhabit this area, thought that the 8,835 foot high promontory was the very center of the universe. If you ever get the chance to go up there, you won’t disagree.

Anyway, that took up Saturday. And Sunday was taken up with doing the stuff I should have been doing on Saturday, and, hey, suddenly it was Monday. And I do mean suddenly!
So, we’re putting the Stump Remoal program on hold for a little bit.

“Bully,” roars the Chairman of the Board of Directors. “Let’s put it off for a decade!”

“Have ye gone daft?” grumbles the Chief Engineer.

We’ve been working on clearing the rails, or at least the roadbed, around the Paris Loop, north of the Parisian Turnout. Part of the reason for the dilapidation of the Paris Loop, it turns out, is that the area was overrun by Creeping Charlie…the plant, not the fellow. Unchecked, the plant buried the existing railroad foundations and accessories under dirt and plant detritus. Amazing what these plants can do, I tell you. Amazing!

One of the items to emerge from what now seems like more of an archaeological dig than a model railroad is what appears to be a lamppost. It has a base about an inch and a half in diameter, through which is stuck a whale of a screw, itself still attached to a plank of an old scale deck. A round pole, G-scale, of course, rises out of the base, and terminates in the remains of a broken light bulb. There appears to be no facility for a shade, although I’m certain there was one at some point.

Two other items of a more electrical nature rose from the wreckage as well. One was a junction box, with outlets in it! Broken off of its conduit but still attached by wires, I have yet to test its connectivity. If it works, this could be a new way to provide electricity to the entire railway from a very convenient location.

Accompanying the outlet is a tag strip – you can see it in the picture. I rifled through my 1996 LGB catalog (you mean there’s a newer one?!?), but could find nothing like it. I think this device will be of great service in figuring out the wiring of the Parisian Loop, if I can ever get it cleaned up!

As you’ll recall, I had a stroke about six years ago. Certain details have been completely erased from my memory. Digging through this Creeping Charlie detritus and retrieving bits of the railroads history is like pulling back cobwebs. On one hand it’s fascinating to find this stuff. On the other hand it’s kind of creepy…what did happen?