I’ve bit the bullet, Jan. 15, 2011

[princessclyne69]

I started laying rail on the two turnback loops before I left on the month-long excursion, with one rail end-to-end on each of them. Now after I came back, I finished out the one that’s connected to the temporary yard. I put in a #6 Micro Engineering turnout, with enough flex track to connect to each of the new main tracks. This afternoon I finished rail laying on that module, and ran 35 40′ boxcars onto it. The likely next step is to get the other turnback loop finished out with main tracks, even though it’s not connected to anything right now. Those two are the heaviest modules I’ve built. Right now I’m not going to try to do much if any scenery on them, because I’ll be figuring out what the best street orientation is. Fortunately, the MoPac had two curves between the 25th street yard and downtown, so streets crossed at a couple of different angles. That should help disguise the turnbacks once everything is in its proper place. But some scenery prep will be in order, like grinding the 1/4″ plywood subroadbed to an approximately 45 degree angle. I often would do that after the roadbed was in place, but I was in a hurry so it’ll be after the fact.

RG7

[princessclyne69]

This weekend I decided to start boxing freight cars. About five years ago, some time after I started buying RTR freight cars, I thought it would be a good idea to start hanging on to the boxes, since I knew we’d eventually move and many of these boxes started having nice plastic inserts that would protect the cars much better than being in foam carriers. My guess is that the Kadee boxes were the first ones I regularly kept.

Organizing stuff has never been a high priority for me, so I pretty much had a ‘box pile’. After packing all weekend, I have pretty much reduced the box pile to just some odd leftovers. The Kadee box pile is separate, so that’ll be a project for another weekend. The irony is that Kadee boxcars survived just fine in the foam car carriers, while the Branchline paint (mostly) suffered horribly from adhesion to the foam. But there are no Branchline boxes, since I built all those from kits. I think I have some suitable liner material, that I’ll try.

My goal is that, every time we drive to Wichita a load of crap, er, valuable stuff goes with us. The railroad stuff definitely needs to start being in that mix, and my wife promised me I could stack cartons of freight cars in the front room so I’m taking her up on it.

There were a number of cars I found that had some kind of oversize plastic couplers, so as I found them they came downstairs and got Kadee 58s. I keep stashes of Kadees painted boxcar red and rust color, and new Kadees have blackened springs so a black car gets those out of the package. Usually I use the 58 with the bronze sheet spring for the replacements, but they might get whisker couplers if the bronze spring doesn’t work well enough. While all of my cars get uncoupling levers when they’re built new, for these I skipped that step so they’ll probably have to take another trip to the bench some time in the future. Bear in mind I model an era before it was required to have coupler castings bare for better UT examination.

The main reason I’m clearing cars off the railroad is so I can do more trackwork and subroadbed. While I have a plan for stuffing modules into a U-haul truck, it’s probably better not to go overboard on the scenery so I’m concentrating on finishing stuff that I think is reasonably sturdy. Time will tell if this is the right approach.

RG7

[peggyrothschild]

Ron
I could never understand why someone would toss out boxes. I just helped a widow recently in identifying Athearn diesels, Broadway Limited steam and several brass engines based on photos where the modeler tossed out the all boxes. Same (obviously) with his freight cars.

[Bud Moss]

Long ago, when I was a more avid brass collector, I used to get a newsletter for a fellow who ran a company called Balls of Brass. One newsletter had a letter from a subscriber relating how he bought brass locomotives and let his dog play with the boxes after he removed the locomotives. I imagine hundreds of dollars were lost in the resale value of the locomotives without boxes. Sometimes my wife wonders why I have boxes of boxes in storage. one day, I think it will prove worthwhile. Like Charlie, I have been involved with widows and children of model railroaders who had terribly disorganized collections without boxes, and it is sheer hell trying to sort it all out, and find new boxes in which to put the models. Although most of our models are probably never going to appreciate in value, good records, such as an Excel spreadsheet and original boxes will make life easier for those who survive us.

Jerry

P. S., the seller with the scale test cars had more than one. I decided Bush, Illinois, needed one to test all the coal mine scales. Now I need number for the scale test cars. Anyone know of a 1950s era photo?

[princessclyne69]

The 1968 SoE lists numbers X192 to X197. I have a photo of it, but for some reason it’s not in my slide index. It was orange, with minimal lettering. There’s a Brian Ehni photo on the Screaming Eagle website, where it, like the one I shot, was directly ahead of the caboose in transit.

Don’t know when they were painted orange, or what color they were before then. I don’t think the orange was in use mid-50s.

RG7

[princessclyne69]

Quite some time ago, I built a set of three modules which represent the area in Wichita where the MoPac crosses the Santa Fe and the Wreck Island and the WTA trackage crosses and interchanges with everybody. Most of the WTA trackage is storage or spurs to elevators and mills, so it’s secondary trackage and lower than the mainline trackage, and usually smaller rail. So I modeled all of it using 1/8″ Homabed, with slopes down from the main tracks. This 1/8″ Homabed was glued onto 1/4″ plywood strips just like the mainline trackage was. CVT branchline tie strip went on top of that, and I was going to use some code 70 and some code 55 rail, depending on location.

Elsewhere, at Tolerville (modules 13-14), I had four storage tracks, two on each side of the mainline. There I used 1/4″ Homabed laid directly on the subroadbed, so even though I used code 55 there I was able to spike with no trouble. I had to, since I’ve never been able to use the Barge cement method and have the rail stay down. So I assumed I’d have no trouble in north Wichita, despite the difference in roadbed.

Wrong.

All that trackage, easily forty actual feet of track, proved to be impervious to spikes. Everywhere the 1/8″ Homabed was laid, the spikes would bottom out on the plywood and would not be pushed home. They stuck up far enough, I couldn’t even bright-boy the track without hitting the tops of those spikes. I thought about chiseling out all that plywood, and decided there would be way too much damage and way too much mess for that, to say nothing of all the lost work. I tried drilling the spike holes some distance down into the plywood, using the #74 bit I use to drill the plastic ties. That didn’t work, the plywood wasn’t even going to yield to the points of the ME spikes.

Then it occurred to me, the spikes aren’t all that hard. They’re probably annealed steel wire, if I were to guess. After consuming probably 30,000 spikes in my modeling lifetime, I figured I know how they behave (I’ve bent enough of them…..). So I grabbed my trusty rail cutter, which is hardened steel, and did a diagonal cut across a spike, basically cutting it in half. It went in, and bottomed out, and held well enough. So that’s what I’m doing, spiking all that track with modified spikes. At least, they’re going in to every sixth or eighth tie as opposed to every fourth tie on the mainline. The rail cutter isn’t that much the worse for wear, considering it’s probably twenty years old. So, everybody’s happy, and I’m not telling the tool guys about cutting steel spikes with my rail cutter.

RG7

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