Spent a chunk of the afternoon installing this bit of benchwork -- finding the right height for it, leveling it off, screwing all the bits in place. It turned out to be a lot more fiddling than I thought it would. It always does.

I wanted to keep it as low as possible without impeding the passage of dome liner cars on the tracks beneath. I found the ideal height through a little experimentation -- inching the posts up and down a quarter inch at a time, then pushing dome cars back and forth along the track.

With that settled, I had only to cut the lumber I needed, then screw it in place, easily the least enjoyable part of the job. I had to contort myself into all kinds of yoga poses I didn't know I could do to fit myself beneath the bench so I could drill out the needed holes, then drive screws into each of them.

About three hours later, with a short break for lunch, this 20 x 48 inch piece is in place. The passenger station will eventually be erected over five tracks on the near end of the plywood sheet. 

To give you an idea what’s been going on along the Lost Continent Railway, here’s an overhead shot of the layout. Compare with April 4, 2011.

In my spare time this weekend, between washing clothes and tending to a plumbing emergency, I laid twenty-four feet of track; made templates to build four of the switches in the middle of the layout; made an adjustment to the road bed that ran a little too close to the track below it, preventing dome cars from passing beneath; tried and failed to figure out why I can’t seem to cut track joiners with my Dremel tool without shattering the cutoff wheel, spraying my face with bits of grit and initiating a cloudburst of cussing; connected temporary electrical jumpers to the longest stretch of track to run a choo-choo train back and forth just for the hell of it; searched high and low for a piece of crossover track that I know I bought a month or two ago, but never did find it; and soldered, soldered, soldered but never once burned my fingers! It’s one for the record books!

All weekend long I’ve had this song stuck in my head:

I’ve been working on the raillll-road all the live-long day.
I’ve been working on the railroad just to pass the time away.
Can’t you hear the whistle blowing? Rise up so early in the morn.
Can’t you hear the captain shouting, “Dinah, blow your horn!”

Dinah, won’t you blow, Dinah, won’t you blow,
Dinah, won’t you blow your hor-roar-roarn!
Dinah, won’t you blow, Dinah, won’t you blow,
Dinah, won’t you blow your horn!

Someone’s in the kitchen with Dinah.
Someone’s in the kitchen, I know-woe-woe-woe.
Someone’s in the kitchen with Die-nah!
Strummin’ on the old banjo.

Come, sing it:
Fee fie fiddle dee eye oh
Fee fie fiddle dee eye oh oh oh oh
Fee fie fiddle dee eye oh
Strummin’ on the old banjo.

I love that song. It’s one of the first songs I can remember my mother singing to me (that, and “Mississippi Mud”) when I was just a pup. I suppose it could be her fault that I’m a train nerd.

Just because I haven’t been posting updates about my project to rebuild the LoCo Railway doesn’t mean I haven’t been tacking on a little benchwork here and a little more there to keep the project going. Whenever I can find twenty minutes or so I sneak down to the basement to see what I can add to it, but there’s been quite a lot going on during the past two weeks to keep me from doing much. For the past five days I’ve spent all day every day downtown with My Darling B at the 13th Annual Wisconsin Film Festival, not thinking of work or anything else except relaxing in a darkened room watching beautifully made films. And the weekend before that I was … well, I can’t remember what we were doing the weekend before that, but it kept me really busy.

Instead of going straight back to work the day after the film fest, My Darling B got the brilliant idea of taking off the Monday after so we could enjoy an emergency back-up, time-delayed weekend during which we could sit around in our pajamas, reading the paper and sipping coffee, in order to put ourselves in the right frame of mind to go back to the office. Did us a world of good.

After this morning’s coffee and pajamas, I stole a few hours this afternoon to cut some plywood for the stretch of road that runs past the front side of the layout. The ply had to be screwed down to the benchwork so it was level from side to side, and so that it ran slightly uphill the long way. Took a bit longer to figure out than I thought it would, but I got there eventually.

Even though this looks like much the same photo I took of the layout benchwork yesterday, it’s a do-over, because an unwritten but widely acknowledged law of the universe clearly states that we can’t have it exactly right the first time, can we?

In point of fact, the big doughnut I cut out and glued together yesterday was exactly, but exactly as big as I meant to make it: sixty inches across. The reason I had to rebuild it was not because the Big Cosmic F.U. reached in and bumped my elbow to make me gank up an angle or cut a board too short. No, what happened was that, for reasons I can’t quite wrap my head around, I figured that the doughnut had to be sixty inches across. That was not correct. The doughnut had to be sixty-nine inches across, and the difference is significant enough that I could not fudge it, alter the plan just a little bit and use the sixty-inch doughnut after all. There will be no fudging going on here. I’m sticking to the plan.

So, after I pulled my head completely out of my ass – knock wood – I revved up the table saw again and ripped another two-by-four sheet of plywood into eight-inch-wide lengths, then chopped them up into angled pieces with the miter saw and glued them together to make the much wider doughnut that you see in the updated photo. And now I’ve got a roadbed that matches the plan of the layout, and all will be well. Huzzah.

I spent about three hours trying to figure out how to make this goddamned thing.

I needed a great big doughnut-shaped piece of plywood sixty inches across I could lay a curve of railroad track on. The easiest way to do this is: Get a sheet of plywood sixty inches wide, draw a big circle on it, cut the circle out with a jigsaw – done!

But that leaves you with a big sheet of plywood with a sixty-inch hole cut out of the middle that you can’t do much with, if anything. To use the plywood up as completely as possible, I figured that I could cut it into nine-inch-wide strips, then cut the strips into much shorter blocks with ends angled so that, when I put them together, they would make an almost-circle. I figured a twelve-sided shape would give me the best circle, and I knew that I would have to cut the ends at a fifteen-degree angle, but the part I had the hardest time figuring out was how long to make each piece.

You’d think the internet would have the answer to this, but it doesn’t, or at least it doesn’t have an answer I can understand. Most of the forumlas I found had cosines and square roots and all that geometrical crap I didn’t understand when I had a teacher to pester with stupid questions. No teacher hanging around my house today, though, so I had to come up with something on my own.

And what I came up with was this: The big circle was sixty inches in diameter. That means the circumference was almost one hundred eighty-eight and a half inches. I wasn’t building a circle, I was building what is technically known as a dodecagon, but twelve sides is so many that it almost looks like a circle, so I figured each piece of it should be fifteen and three-quarters inches long on the outside by dividing 188.5 by twelve and calling it close enough.

And you know what? It worked. I started getting kind of worried as I cut up the plywood pieces because they looked too short, but after I pieced it together I laid a tape measure across the whole great big thing and what do you know, it turned out to be sixty inches across. You’re as amazed as I am, aren’t you?

It’s another post about the big plywood box I’m building in the basement! I keep adding to it even though I haven’t brought it to your attention in quite a while. If I had, the posts would have looked something like this: It’s a big box. It’s a bigger box. It’s an even bigger box. So you can probably see why I haven’t mentioned it.

I’ve been making the box bigger and bigger each weekend by adding more benchwork on either side. It would make one hell of a great basement bar if I changed gears at this point and put a walnut top on it right now, lined the wall with shelves for gin and rum, and hung a disco ball from the ceiling. Too bad I don’t drink anything stronger than beer. And I’m boring. A basement bar just doesn’t fill any of my social needs.

A basement train set, on the other hand, suits my social needs perfectly. Make what you want out of that, I’ve come to terms with it. So there won’t be any walnut top, no bottle-lined shelves and no disco ball. Instead, there will be fluorescent lighting and a nifty control panel to make the trains go around. It’s not as wild and crazy as a bar but it’s still kind of fun if you never bothered to mature any farther than eight years old.

The train tracks will make a big figure eight, crossing in the middle of the room over the big box in the center, so I’ve been working on building the bench tops that reach out like wings from either end of the middle. Last weekend I added wings to the right, and although you can’t quite see it in this photo, I spent a few nights this week putting together one of the wings on the left. Then I had a facepalm moment.

I realized as I was finishing up the left-hand wing that after the benchwork was put together I’d have one hell of a time turning on the overhead fluorescent lights. Up until this point I’d been walking right up to them and yanking on the pull chain. That’s no problem right now, but after the benchwork covers the floor and fills in that whole end of the basement I won’t be able to walk over to the lights on the far side of the room at all, so building the benchwork came to a screeching halt while I mulled over how to wire together all the lights.

And that’s what I’ve been doing this weekend. A few trips to the hardware store, a few hours on a stepladder, a little cussing and some sore muscles later, and now the lights are plugged into a series of overhead electric outlets that are connected by an easy-to-get-to switch on the wall. And now I can get back to building a great big box.

Day One of the Rebuild of the New Lost Continent Railway: The benchwork. [I know it looks like a big, empty box with no sides. Play along with me here.]

I’ve been pecking away at this a little bit through the week, whenever I could find an hour or two after dinner. The frames at the ends and in the middle of the bench are salvaged from the previous incarnation of the LoCo but I had to clean them up a bit to make them work for this layout: saw off some dowels, pull out some nails, shorten the legs from fifty-three to forty-eight inches, and add blocks to the corners to make the bench a bit more rigid (I hope).

They were cleaned up and ready to go this morning and I had even found time to rip a set of rails from three-quarter inch plywood, so I after our Sunday morning routine of coffee and a show I changed out of my jammies into some work trousers and began the first steps of piecing together the New Lost Continent Railway.

I finished the frame nearest the camera this morning, working slowly to see how well the salvaged pieces fit together as part of the new plan. I thought of this mostly as a test; if it didn’t work out, I was going to chop it up into little pieces and start over again with new lumber. Happily, it went together so smoothly that I ripped four more rails this afternoon and pieced together the back half of the bench this evening.

This is about all I had time for today. To go on to the next step, which will have to be moving a pile of books out of the corner if I want to have the room I need to keep building, I’ll have to go back to eking out an hour here and there after supper.

WHAT HAVE I DONE?

I demolished my model train layout this weekend. The original section still stands, but only because it’s going to take me the better part of a day to disconnect the electrical fixtures and unscrew all the hardware that I’ve attached to it over the years. I’m hoping to begin rebuilding later this week.

This is all John Armstrong‘s fault, or that’s who I’m going to blame, anyway. Ever since I laid eyes on a track plan he drew for the August, 1953, issue of Model Railroader, I’ve been dreaming about building it.

First, I tried to adapt it to fit the bench work I’d already built. I didn’t want to tear it down and start over, because, you know, yuk. But no matter how I fiddled with it, I couldn’t get it to fit. And the more I fiddled with it, the more I knew that fiddling with it would only make it so much less fun than the plan that Armstrong drew in the first place.

So I started to think in terms of building the plan as is, or nearly so. Armstrong’s 5 x 10 plan called for a minimum radius on the main line of twenty-four inches, with eighteen-inch curves on the branch lines. I didn’t want the curves to be quite so tight, and I had more room to play with, so I drove over to the library one afternoon last week and used their copier to enlarge the drawing until it was twelve inches on the long side. Then I re-drew the grid lines on the layout to make it a 6 x 12 plan. Finally satisfied that I could make the curves almost thirty percent bigger and still fit it into the back of the basement, I tried to get myself into a frame of mind that would let me demolish the bench work I’ve been building up for the last four years.

I started by picking noncommittally at the acoustic tiles I’d used instead of homasote for the track bed, just to see how cleanly I could separate it from the masonite subfloor. Pretty cleanly, it turned out. The tiles were way too easy to pry off with my fingers, and I could peel the acrylic adhesive completely off the masonite with a chisel in one long stroke with a little practice. In no time at all I’d carved up the rest of the tiles with a craft knife and was prying them off one at a time until they were all stacked at my feet. And I had to admit to myself at that point that I was pretty goddamned committed to demolishing the rest of it.

The masonite was glued to the cross-braces of the bench work but came up surprisingly easily without cracking. I’ll be able to reuse almost all of it as subfloor for the roadbed on the new layout. Next, I knocked all the cross-braces out with a few taps from a hammer. They were just glued in, too. I undid the screws fastening the benchwork frame to the Phase II module next, then broke the frame down until nothing was left but the end brackets. I’m going to cut each one of them in half, add a leg and use them as part of the bench work to brace up one end of the new layout.

I still had quite a bit of steam built up, so I started demolishing the long module on the end of the layout by severing the bridge that connected it to the station yard. This was also glued together and easy to knock to pieces with a few taps of the hammer. Quite a bit of the bench work was assembled this way, but the crossover bridge was a kludge so head-slappingly jerry-rigged that I’m amazed how well it held up under the onslaught of my periodic abuse. I laid down and tore out track over this part of the layout at least three times and it never gave way. Thank goodness.

That done, I began tearing the tiles off the long module, then cleaning up the masonite, and finally throwing away all the junk. That last step ran a close second to the hardest thing I did, including tearing to pieces the layout I built with my own two loving hands, as temps have hovered around ten degrees all day, which is why I spent pretty much all afternoon in the basement working on my layout. I was outside a grand total of maybe ninety seconds and I FROZE MY NIPPLES OFF! Literally. I now have no nipples.

Now I’m down to the really hard part: Getting all the passenger cars and kit boxes and tools and other crap that’s piled up on the bottom shelf of the original module, which I’ve been using as a work bench, and moving it away some place else, any place else, so I can finish this demolition and start rebuilding.

As it turned out, cleaning up all that crap didn’t take as long as I thought it would: I had just about all of it loaded into boxes and stashed on the other side of the basement with enough time before lunch to tear all the tiles off the top and peel the adhesive off the masonite. The clean-up went so quickly because a lot of the kit stuff was still in the original boxes or the original box was close by, and quite a lot of the small parts that were part of a model I’d been working on were already carefully stored in small boxes or pill bottles. I’ve lost a lot of parts to carelessly leaving them on the desk top, thinking it would be just a very short time before I put them back. Now that I know that never happens, I always drop parts into boxes or bottles as I take them off.

After pulling up all the tiles, cleaning off the masonite boards and stashing them away I still had a little time left before lunch, so I dismantled the portion of the bench work that I added on to the original bench, which was only four feet long and just under three feet wide. This was what I started with five years ago, what would have been my N-scale shelf layout that was almost immediately abandoned for an HO-scale shelf layout. I never had a plan for either one, just an idea in my head that was constantly morphing, and as soon as I started on the HO-scale layout it morphed again into a layout that would need more room, hence the addition, and every addition after that.

These constant changes were fun to pursue for a while, but over the years they’ve only grown frustrating as I’ve never had a track that I can run trains over. BUT NOW, I HAVE A PLAN! And I’m not going to change it in any way at all. I’ve drawn a sketch for the bench work and I’m going to start putting that together this week. Six by twelve, it’s going to run the length of the back wall, just as this one eventually did, but it’s not going to take up nearly as much of the room as the old one did, and there will be two openings in it, one on each end, so all of the track, even the corners, will be within reach without pulling a muscle or standing tip-toe on a stepladder, something I couldn’t count on before.

Back to work!

The track gang has been at work again!

Trains leaving the platform would have to negotiate a tight S-turn (to the right, behind the pail of spackle) that's been torn up in favor of re-routing the exit track to the left around a much more train-friendly thirty-six inch curve.

To lay track along the broader curve, the gang filled the gaps between the old roadbeds with plenty of spackle. When it's try, the new track will be laid around the broader curve to meet up with the road bed in the foreground, about two inches from the edge of the table top.

Laying the last length of track in the terminal yard. Books hold the track flat to the cork roadbed while the glue dries.

It works better if you use books about railroads.

View from the crossing tower

A look down the yard throat into the terminal yard. A trio of number six switches have been installed to replace the number four scissors switch that impeded traffic into the yard before. A single track leaves the yard where once there was a double track.

And the track gang was strongly encouraged by the chief engineer to clean up all the crap that had collected in the yard, after he promised to put a fifty-dollar tab on the bar at the Buffalo Nickel Tavern in exchange for a job well done.

I was hoping that a five-pack of Blue Point switch machines would arrive Saturday so I could install them before the weekend was out but, as it happens, UPS doesn't deliver on Saturdays or Sundays, so no luck there. Not wanting to wait any longer I glued the switches down and a length of track leading away from the throat through a tight, twenty-four inch curve.

A new way out

The track gang's been at it again. After a long winter spent mostly in the dark, smoke-filled back rooms at the Lost Piranha Tavern, they managed to rouse their lazy butts from their bench seats and get some work done reopening the yard throat.

These #6 switches will make it possible for all the engines of the Lost Continent Railway to come and go, from the big steamers bringing in a big drag from a cross-country run, to the short yard goats, spotting passenger cars along the platforms. That's the dream, anyway.

The longest locos have had no trouble at all to date crawling through these Code 83 Atlas Super turnouts, when last we ran trains along the road. This time around I'm taking as long as necessary to prepare the roadbed, cutting holes for the switch machines, and fixing the track to the bench.

Plans to hand-lay track along this stretch were set aside in favor of getting the road up and running. Perhaps next summer we'll give the PCB method a try, but I'm hoping to have big steam pulling a string of streamliners around the bend before April's over.

Scissors beats steam engine

No matter how slowly and carefully I try, I can't get the big steamer through the crossover at the yard throat. The geometry's too tight for the steamer's long, rigid wheelbase.

This is serious.

I haunted e-bay for weeks to get that crossover at a good price, but if the line's flagship steamer can't get through it, it has to go, no matter how much it hurts to tear it up.

Scissors beats steam engine

... the track gang made short work of the offending crossover once the order was given.

Scissors beats steam engine

I used flex track to help plot the geometry for the planned crossover.

Scissors beats steam engine

To lay the track for the new crossover, I'm going to try soldering rails to PCB ties.

I have no local source for these ties, and I wanted to get started right away, so I drove down to Radio Shack and found they had 4x5 sheets of undrilled PCB, so I took one home and cut it up with a hand saw.

This is a lot more trouble than it's worth, believe me, and the cost is about the same. I got thirty-one ties for my five-dollar investment. Fastrax will sell me one-hundred ties for eighteen bucks and save me the trouble of cutting them up. The won't be this long, but now that I've got all the long ones I need, I don't care.

A Control Panel for the LoCo

I thought it might take all of an hour to cobble together this control panel. The cover is a recycled shelf I built years ago, the angle braces were cut off the ends of cedar I found in the scrap box, and the underside is a piece of MDB left over from another project. It was all nearly ready-made; how could it possibly take longer than an hour to put together? I figured I'd be playing with trains all afternoon.

It didn't take an hour. It took four. I still don't know how.

But it's all together now except for the soldering. The flip-top makes it much easier to get at the electrical components than when they were all hidden under the bench top and I had to crawl underneath to get at them. I'm still not happy with the bracket for hanging the hand-held, but that's something I can improve later. It works for now.

Today's Project

The paint shop after further upgrade.

A bathroom exhaust fan draws air into the booth and out the back. A few layers of t-shirt cotton stretched over an old picture frame will be fixed against the hole to filter paint from the air.

I still have to cut out a pane of plexiglass to tack over the upper half of the paint box opening.

Switching maneuvers

Today's project: Upgrade the paint shop.

The Paasche air compressor was a lucky find at an estate sale. I think I got it for less than ten bucks.

I've played around with it and an air brush I bought on e-bay but what I really wanted was a switched plug for it and an exhaust fan. Today's project was to wire the switch and plug.

The shelf they're mounted on is just off the floor under the spray booth that's built into the work bench above it. The hose for the air brush will easily reach the front of the booth.

The End's In Sight

The track gang has put in a good day laying rail in the terminal yard, and the gang's boss, Dominic, has hauled them all away in the back of the company flatbed for a round of drinks at The Thirsty Camel to show his appreciation for their hard work.