Mountain Goats Train Thread.

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Even dealing with all-over muscle spasms and a bit of a ME/CFS flare yesterday I did make progress on a model train project

(okay, true, holding a Dremel tool spinning a cutoff disk at something like 30,000 rpm while potentially suddenly having muscle spasms in my back or arms or hands might not be Einstein level genius, but, hey, I want to still have a life and things which bring me happiness and something which at least resembles sanity enough that I can get away with calling it sanity)

Got the literal 'dim bulb' factory-issue headlight bulb mounts cut off the frames of a couple Mantua F9s.
Going to replace the frame mount incandescent bulb with an LED mounted in the body's headlight location.






(Hey! Look at all that zinc dust! I can avoid the high priced supplements and lick it directly off my kitchen counter!)

(NO! I did not actually do that!)
(and don't YOU do it either!)

*Railway geek / pedant alert*

Looking at Mountain Goat and Juliette telling a week or two ago about making things out of balsa wood I was thinking, "oh! making stuff from balsa is fun, what can I "go ye forth and do likewise" and make for my little railroad at home?"

So, last week I pulled out a box of balsa bits a health support group friend in a little burg in Colorado had sent me a couple years back and made a loading dock for the l.c.l. freight house.
(Less than Car Load)
The plastic kit building also had its floor height raised to boxcar and flatbed truck height with some of that balsa.
Will, eventually, be finished to look like a concrete foundation.
I had to get a flatbed truck from David at model train club, I had no HO scale trucks!
(he's moving back to the east coast next year, will miss him, he grew up with railroads I know from my growing up years)

Planking was scribed/drawn with a 0.5mm mechanical pencil & the wood was weathered with pastels which were rubbed in then sealed with art fixative.









Showing the setting; pretty much everything visible is not yet finished & I can't say if it will ever be.

Probably 80% of what I can say I know about UK 0-6-anything locomotives is that I have this book;

After that, I know of the Dean Goods 0-6-0, of the Furness Ry 0-6-0, of the LBSC Terrier 0-6-0, of the LMS Fowler 0-6-0, of the GWR pannier tank 0-6-0, of the Gooch broad gauge 0-6-0, that the Great Eastern had some attractive blue 0-6-0, and that's it!

Outside frame, even - cool!

Well, here's a wheel arrangement that came one away from becoming extinct; There are no other standard gauge locomotives left of this wheel arrangement in the British isles.

https://preservedbritishsteamlocomotive ... y-railway/

But despite being on her own here one of her sisters lucked out and also survives albeit utterly derelict in Australia;

http://australiansteam.com/JAB%205.htm

Now you know some useless information!

Every time I look for this thread, it goes to an entirely different thread instead what has nothing to do with trains, so I have to wait for one of you to post in it so I can see it.
Balsa wood. I do not use balsa wood as it is expensive for what one is getting, but I do use pine and whatever wood I can find that is cheap or free. Also with balsa it is very lightweight wood, so most of the situations where I use wood which at the moment is making model railway rolling stock, I would have to add extra weight if I use balsa, but using a heavier wood means I rarely have to add any weight to them.

So for me at the moment, balsa is not my first choice. If I wanted to make a working model aircraft then balsa would be my first choice if it is strong enough for the situation.
Balsa does have the advantage that it is easy to work on and cut so for some situations it is ideal.

That's crazy about the trouble going to the correct thread.

Well, hey, my memory was 2/3 right, you had made a thing and had made it from wood!

Creative writers group meeting this morning was good, were 5 of us there.
But my brain wasn't good for writing so after an hour or so I went on over to model train club, literally right across the street from where writers group meets, and accomplished a small thing I had meant to do last year.

That being that the yard tracks each have a rail gapped to allow cutting power to that track and parking complete trains with locomotives.

I had maybe 2 years ago now penciled in a service road across the yard to mark the gapped rail location in a way that is easy to find - as in, the track far side of road turns off, the track on the power pack side, near side, of road does not.

(road extending straight to viewers' right goes down to a passenger platform between tracks at far end of yard)
(road angling up to left goes to engine service area)

Today I painted asphalt color in road location. Will eventually build a full 3 dimensional road with planked track crossings.
I masked the road edges to keep them mostly straight but wood grain and masking tape don't exactly make an airtight seal.

Harry, Harry's Sister, and Ken were at model train club when I went over.
Randy arrived a bit later.

As you might suspect, it was a mixed occasion of shoot the breeze a lot, accomplish a couple things, and drive some trains.

And as an added bonus at no extra charge, I came home from model train club with some Model Railroader magazines, maybe 8 or 9 issues, from the 1960s before I arrived in life to liven up this planet.

Some neat track plans and neat articles about building various things

Hi Kites. Out of interest, have you heard of Wrenn who used to make 00 gauge trains? Real durable things and expensice, but they would lasy 50 years and then some more!