Home Page › Forums › Modeling the Missouri Pacific, Texas & Pacific, etc › Mopac or Texas & Pacific layouts › I’ve bit the bullet, Jan. 15, 2011 › Reply To: I’ve bit the bullet, Jan. 15, 2011
WHAT was it the Engines said,
Pilots touching,—head to head
Facing on the single track,
Half a world behind each back?
— Bret Harte, 1869, on the occasion of a more momentous golden spike
Not wanting to be overly melodramatic, but today I completed the main line at Module 8, at the future location of the Fall River bridge. Right now it’s a piece of flextrack held up by plywood, but I have successfully run an engine and several cars back and forth over it. There is spiked rail at each end, with the lucky circumstance that a single piece of flextrack was exactly the right length to bridge the gap.
There’s a horrible, derailment-quality hump at one end that I need to work on, by cutting into the roadbed on module 7 and lowering it for an inch or so, and I need some better gapping. But now there is 138 feet of continuous rail on the main line, plus about 60 feet of branchline that doesn’t connect, which itself needs major work. But at least it’s in place.
In other news, this week we bought another house in Wichita which may be the permanent one. It’s in a location, College Hill, where there can’t be a railroad building adjacent to the house. It’s also older than the previous one, but it was built after the Cubs won the World Series the last time. When this house was new, you could have taken the streetcar down Douglas to the MoPac station and sailed to Germany to meet the Kaiser.
So, yet another challenge…..
Watch this space.
Ron Merrick
