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.

A rainy day, combined with a recent payday, gave me the time and resources to stay in the basement and lay roadbed in the terminal yard.

I'm spreading a bead of an inexpensive acrylic caulk that works well to glue down the roadbed. It starts out white but dries clear, an improvement over the brownish caulk I was using before.

After the roadbed was laid, I spread spackle between the cork to fill in the yard. I'd highly recommend it over laying a wide sheet of cork. The spackle's easy to spread, fills in completely and is easily repairable.

After sawing off the roof I had to square off the top edge of the walls. I suppose there's an easy way to do that, but I did it by cutting the walls apart at the corners, then pressing them against a sheet of sandpaper and gently sanding away the bumps until I had a smooth edge. When the top edges both looked nice and straight, I got ready to glue them back to the floor ...

But first, I cut away a thick plastic flange along either side of the floor that used to help hold the shell on. Didn't need that any longer. I also cut a piece of sheet styrene and glued that over the floor to make for a clean, flat working surface.

Finally, I glued the sides back in place. When I checked this morning, the glue had set up firm and tight.

I didn't have enough time to day to do much more than think about how I wanted to arrange the interior, although I did cut and paste together some card paper strips to rough out the rooms I wanted.

Today the chief engineer was scheduled to oversee some tracklaying, but something else caught his eye: an observation car at a bargain price! Just the kind of rolling stock the chief had in mind for his personal business car.

Almost none of the passenger cars on the LoCo have interiors because they're nearly all bargain-shelf Athearn models -- not that there's anything wrong with them. On the contrary, at the prices commanded by commercially-available finished models, there wouldn't be but a tiny handful of rolling stock on the roster if it weren't for the bare-bones models from Athearn, which the management of the Lost Continent Railway finds perfectly presentable.

The body shop at Dog Water Flowage is still under repair after its nearly total destruction in a conflagration triggered by a short in the heating element of an unauthorized distillery hidden under the floorboards, so the chief engineer began to assemble the car on his own, normally a very quick and easy task of screwing the wheel trucks to the floor, then the weights. Windows snap into the openings and a few extra bits of detail like the brake wheel and the railing around the observation platform would finish the car in just a few minutes.

But the head end of the car has no bulkhead for the vestibule, so the chief cut one from a piece of .020 polystyrene using the rear bulkhead as a pattern, carefully tracing the windows for a doorway and cementing it to the sides with some scrap styrene strip.

"That was pretty easy," the chief thought, wondering how long it would take to add a couple rooms and a side passage. The trick, he realized after eyeballing the job, was that the sides and roof of Athearn cars are cast as a shell that clips over the floor. It would be much easier if the roof came off. How difficult could that be?

Only one way to find out.

I started the job of trying to cut the roof off by carefully scoring just under the rivet line with an X-acto knife. After about five passes I began to understand why modelers go straight for their Dremel tools when they start a kit bash like this one.

Still, I was hesitant because I knew a cut-off wheel would melt the plastic even at the Dremel's slowest speed, so I practiced a bit by cutting the roof off an old Tyco caboose, and the results were promising enough to let me dare to move on to the observation car.

It's nearly impossible to make a straight cut, and the burr of melted plastic makes the cut look like hell, but I took my time, kept at it, and found it doesn't turn out nearly as bad as it first looks once the burr is carefully scraped away.

Cutting with the Dremel tool revealed what the X-acto knife only began to hint at: These models are made with plastic so thick it could deflect bullets! Battleships don't have armor plating this thick! Even after going all the way around the roof with the Dremel's cut-off wheel I had to use a utility knife to finish cutting through the thickest parts of the plastic.

With the roof finally sawn off, the job of building up the interior begins to look much more conceivable than before.

Before I begin on the interior, however, there's just a little more work with the Dremel tool to do: I'll have to saw off the head end of the car so I can lay the sides out flat on the work bench. That way I can square off the upper edges of the sides so the roof will sit flat on them.

After the sides are squared off, I can glue the bulkheads again, then glue the whole kit and kaboodle to the floor

Spotting cars

The track gangs have finished laying two more switches in the terminal yard of the grand central station yet to be named.

As a test of their proficiency, the chief engineer has spent the afternoon spotting a few spare cars on the spurs. He declared the ride through the switches to be so smooth that the first round of drinks at the Thirsty Camel are on him.

His announcement was met with three cheers, and the track gang carried him off on their shoulders, leaving these cars littering the yards.

More of the track gang's handiwork; these three spurs will serve the commissary yards at Hollow Leg. There's a nasty kink in the outside curve at the far left that the chief engineer hasn't found yet, and Dominic Fraboni, boss of the track gang, aims to keep him ignorant of it.

Compare this photo with a shot of the same ground back in December. The work is coming along slowly, but it's coming along just the same.

Gone Round The Bend

The chief engineer takes a two-car special for a spin around a newly-completed stretch of track along the main line up to the terminal throat. The crossover switches haven't been wired for operation yet, so he backs the special through the s-turn and stops for the photographer.