Turn, Baby, Turn!

A four-coupled Niagara can just barely squeak through this turn, which is so tight the main drivers of the engine are pressed to the absolute limits of their considerable side-to-side movement. At the tightest point of the curve, the driving rods thunk-thunk-thunk with each revolution of the wheels against the plastic body as the engine crawls along.


I tweaked this curve quite a bit trying to make a Shinohara switch with a #6 frog fit the curve, but it's simply not going to work. It needs at least a #5, or more probably a #4. To find out which will work best, I'll rip the track up, draw a curve with a 24" radius and measure the divergent route.

The plan called for a 24" radius in the first place. Moral: Develop a plan, then stick to it!

Slow and Steady ...

... a few more squares of foam pared to fit around corners and against each other ... glued to the stretchers and held until morning by carefully balanced stacks of books ... track soldered together into nine-foot segments ...

Scotty! Give Me All You've Got!

"That's every book in the ship's library, cap'n! I cannae gi' nae more!"

You can own every work bench gimmick made, and when it comes to holding a sheet of foam down flat against glue-slathered wood runners, nothing will do the trick like stacks and stacks of heavy books.

Tonight's sixty-minute trip on the Lo Co combined some bench work with painting. After scrounging around for a half-hour or so I managed to piece together enough blocks of pink foam to provide a base for the track work. When I was reasonably sure it was laid out in the pattern I needed for the notional track plan I had worked out, I marked the positions of the pieces, moved it all away, squirted a little glue across the supports and voila! The mess you see here.

And I painted a dining car and an RPO. Photos to follow.

Not Much, How About You?

Eked out just a half-hour tonight to do a little painting, a second coat to the cream color along the top of a diner car. No photo, barely enough time to get the brush wet as it was, but I wanted to get back on that bike after a weekend spent running off to a bed & breakfast with My Darling B to celebrate our wedding anniversary. I didn't ask, but I had the feeling she might have objected if I'd taken a model and a jar of paint along.

On Sunday my time was entirely claimed by yard work, now that the midwest seems to have won a reprieve from the never-ending rain, which naturally means that I was propped up on the sofa in limp dishrag mode Sunday night, unwilling and very possibly unable to lift a paint brush.

But I'm back! to trying to visit the work bench every night and keep the Lost Continent Railway alive.