Trains to Burlington

On Saturday, Victor and I took his old model train layout down to Burlington, to pass it on to Victor's cousin, who has recently become a model train fanatic. Below the break is the version of the story I sent to one of my model rail mailing lists:

Friday night and Saturday

It sounded like a good idea: my son hadn't really been interested for several years, and he was willing to donate the layout and some of his locomotives and rolling stock. My nephew, who is mildly autistic, is going to be over the moon. At least he will be once we get it transported down to his home and set up for him.

I cleverly anticipated this need when purchasing my current vehicle . . . a 4'x6' layout wouldn't have fit comfortably inside a Honda CR-V. I have a Toyota Tacoma pick-up now. Except . . . and here's where my plan had a critical flaw . . . it only has a 5' bed, so the layout won't be able to travel in relative comfort inside the bed with the cover down. I'll have to drop the tail and wrap the 1' of projecting layout to try to keep the (few remaining) trees, bushes, and clumps of ground foam from decorating a 1:1 scale road.

But before I can do that, I have to find a few key parts: some working locomotives and cars. Which were randomly packed up with my stuff when we moved into this house four years back. I've had to a) find all the boxes, which were not conveniently located in one spot; b) open each box to verify that what the label on the outside says has some relationship to what's actually in there; c) having located some (but not all) of the boxes filled with other boxes of the Athearn, MDC, Accurail, Kadee variety, then d) realize that the labels on the little boxes have no connection with the actual contents.

So I spent much of the afternoon opening all the little boxes inside the big boxes, sorting out my son's collection from my own. I thought it would be pretty easy: his stuff would all have X2F couplers (very unrealistic looking things: View image), while mine were all Kadee or other knuckle-type couplers (which both look more like real couplers, but also work better). That quaint notion was abandoned about the fifth box, when I discovered that I'd started converting some of Victor's collection over to using knuckle couplers round about the time we decided to incorporate his layout into my TH&B layout.

Oh, and I forgot to mention that I'd been generous with the packing material inside each of those little boxes. So it wasn't just a case of opening the lid . . . it then required further unpacking to actually see what was hidden within.

Two hours in, I had a horrible sinking feeling: we couldn't find any of his locomotives. A quick trip to the LHS was suddenly on the agenda.

All of you folks who are continuing to add to your marination stashes will laugh when I say I'd hoped to find a decent quality diesel in HO scale for around Cdn$50 or so. I seem to recall the Proto 1000 line having some models in that price range the last time I checked. The locos in stock started at nearly twice that price. But you guys already know that.

So do I, now.

Okay, so he's now got at least one working locomotive (others came to light . . . all together now . . . after I'd dropped a C-note at the LHS). He's got a variety of rolling stock (about 50/50 X2F and knuckle couplers), including a couple of passenger cars. And of course, he's got the layout. With five years of dust and crud and spider webs and mouse poop and other less easily identified things covering it.

Fortunately, I have an air compressor. Not one of those piddling little airbrush compressors: a real power-tool air compressor (insert Tim-the-Tool-Man-Taylor-style grunting here). Did you know you can peel entire strips of scenery off a model train layout and hurl them across the basement with an ill-judged gust of compressed air?

I do now.

I still have the leg assemblies and plenty of L-girders lying around (see here for what I'm talking about), so that'll be no problem. What I don't seem to have are any of the cross-braces to set between the legs and the girders. Oh, well, Pine 1"x2" is pretty cheap. I also couldn't find the gussets to secure the cross-braces to the legs . . . but I do have some roughly triangular cabinet-grade oak cut-offs which will probably do the trick. I'll just need to remember to take along some 1 1/2" screws instead of the 3/4" screws I'd normally use.

Sunday

Mission accomplished. All parties are satisfied with the relocation, ownership transfer, re-assembly, and initial operations on the layout.

Travel to Burlington was a bit more fraught than I'd expected: the layout was too wide to sit between the wheel wells in the back of the truck, so I had to set it up on a pair of cross-bearers . . . which put the top of the scenery too close to the bed cover for the cover to close. This meant I had to drive with the whole assembly in the open position for 150km . . . at highway speed:

Arriving in Burlington

I expected that the wind would finish off what my compressed air had begun yesterday, but to my surprise, only a few bits of scenery failed to arrive at the end of the journey still connected to the main layout. Even the Woodland Scenics plastic trees withstood the trauma (we had to replant three after setting up the layout, and it looked like another four or five had gotten off before the truck came to a complete stop. Other than that, the layout was in pretty good condition.

Victor helped me to re-assemble the benchwork in a cleared area of my sister's basement, and the layout was back in service within an hour of arriving. My nephew spent the rest of the day running trains and making up stories about the trains and their cargo. (Literally . . . my sister had to pry him away from the layout to come upstairs and say goodbye to us as we left).

All in all, a pretty good result, I think. ;-)