Reply To: I’ve bit the bullet, Jan. 15, 2011

[David Boeschen]

Had the usual assortment of non-rail relatives over today, so had a tour of the layout. They do recognize that every time they come over, there’s more railroad to be seen. I ran a train, or rather I had a locomotive pull cuts of cars back and forth, on sections of it. Kind of hard to do, since the bridge is still poorly supported. I glued a couple of pieces of plywood in the places where piers would be. Worked OK with a switcher, but I ran two F units onto the piece of flextrack and one end of the bridge, the flextrack bowed downward and popped out of the rail joiners at the other end, and the engines did not fall all the way because the couplers held them together when the tops of the ends hit. Fortunately, there were no witnesses. I’m betting that it’s not a common occurrence to have one end of a piece of flextrack get flipped a couple of feet in the air.

Then there’s a spot where the train parts, or at least the Athearn geeps lose their train, right at the end of a module so I have a height difference I hadn’t seen before, or probably a low coupler on the geep.

Somewhat off topic, but I have a Life-Like SW7 which has probably run more miles than any other engine on the railroad. It regularly pulls 20 or more cars. I put an Athearn GP9 in its place, and it didn’t come close. With finger assist, it still bogged down. Added a second unit, not much better.

I have Kadee 5s on most cars built before the introduction of the 58, and 58s on pretty much everything since plus anything older that’s been through the shop. But a few of the Athearn cars, notably the three-bay PS2s, have defied coupler change by having a little coupler box mounting screw which is probably a Phillips #0 or #00, that is driven in so tight I can not get it out. So those cars still have those gross plastic couplers made by somebody, and the plastic knuckle springs frequently fail during slack run-ins or backing, or just plain will not stay closed. So those cars are coming real close to an across-the-board recall. Athearn Airslides aren’t much better, but I usually can get the screws out of those without damaging any detail.

Oh yeah, the new part.

I threw some plywood on the fabrication platform and started drawing three new modules, or what Free-mo would call a module set, for the stretch of MoPac main line in Wichita between and including the Santa Fe and Rock Island crossings. This is arguably the most complex stretch of track on the railroad, other than maybe the yard throat. There’s the MoP, of course, which was double track at the time, a three-track Santa Fe line (It seems to have been three tracks during my era of interest, later it was four), the Wreck Island single-track main line, and the WTA (Wichita Terminal Association, which still exists). The poor Frisco, which also crossed the MoPac, just didn’t make the cut as far as the trackage I was able to lay out.

Previously I built the module frames with a pretty good idea of where the track centerline would be, then added the plywood on top. Here, the only way I could do that was to lay out the tracks first and I’ll figure out where the frame will go. Two of these modules stray pretty far from the idea of 24″ width with the track centered on it, but let’s just say that form will have to follow function here. It helps that I’ve built enough modules that I know how all the parts are supposed to fit. I wish I had more distance to play with, but 18 feet is as much as I can go with a turnback loop at each end, in the present train room. I’m trying to lay out the track centers so that I can stick a mini-mo in there and there to add a couple of feet, if I’m ever in the position to do that.

The challenge is that even during my period of interest, the track layout changed. From the aerial photos dated 1950 to 1960, there were a lot of new tracks added, and one track actually rerouted, shifted sideways. I’d love to know why. The arrangement I’m settling on is somewhat of a compromise between the two.

RG7