New bikes

Two bikes were stolen from our yard late last summer. Both Eli and Briggs were left without independent transportation. I was able to replace Briggs' fairly quickly and easily: he didn't mind a no-name brand from Wal-Mart. We've had to wait a while longer to get a new bike for Eli. I knew he would be a little more particular about what he got. We went today and got a nice bike from Epic here in town. It was a trade-in taken just today. The look was right for Eli and the price was right for me. I was thankful to be able to jump on the deal. It's a Raleigh SC-30; I can't tell what model year. But it looks like it's never been ridden! We're off on a Scout bike tour Monday in Virginia. Everybody will get a workout on nice new equipment.

Spring 2012

Spring came early and has hung around. The fruits trees are blooming early too. These are the apples trees and the blueberry bushes. The pear tree's flowers came and went (in a rain storm) so fast I didn't get a chance to get a picture of them. I pruned both apple trees this winter in hopes of improving their yield. I also hope to spray them to keep bugs to a minimum. That's been the biggest reason we've had such poor yield in years past. Hope it goes well.

Wiring

The thing I've been spending most of my time on the for the past year or so is wiring. The track plan came with pretty detailed information, but the components are expensive. (As a friend said, "railway capital is always in short supply.") So I'd buy a couple of bits and install them, wait a couple of months, save, buy a couple more. Finally last fall I was able to buy some wire in bulk and had accumulated enough of the pieces to feel like I could begin wiring. At Thanksgiving I built that little shelf thing to hold the switching components and began attaching parts to it. With a little bit of Christmas money that came my way I was able to purchase the last couple of switches. So I think I have everything I need to finish wiring everything. (I did realize this afternoon that I need to change out one piece of plain track for a terminal section, but that should be a fairly inexpensive fix.)

I finally put something together today than had been puzzling me for several months. There are 12 sections of track in the layout each with its own power control. I have been able to spot in the plans where each was and understand how each was supposed to be wired, except for section 8. I couldn't find it anywhere. Finally today I found a lone "8" not-near-enough to the track in that section. Section 8 does not use a terminal track piece like in other sections but a pair of terminal joiners. Therefore, it looked different in the plan, with no clear link between the digit and the place where the terminal joiners go. I had never noticed the 8 positioned as it was, kind of orphaned from its track location. But today, finally, it all came together.

I have always been nervous working with electricity; the last time I messed with something around the house involving electricity, I called my dad to get him to talk me through it. Also I recently found a discussion board that includes a lengthy thread helping someone else who built this same layout. He encountered a problem and got lots of help, all of it in the discussion. That has been very helpful. The coolest thing I've got working is the turntable. I was able to get the electric control, so I can make it spin to each of the spurs by working a switch rather than using a hand crank.

Of course the big thing in model railroading is the transition over the past few years from direct electric modelling to digital. I'm definitely in the stone age camp. But digital does open up lots of possibilities. One obvious thing that some folks have encountered is the ability to have a locomotive equipped with a camera send a feed to a video monitor, so guests can get a "track-view" perspective of the layout. I've got no illusions. On top of everything else, the new stuff is very expensive. Maybe next time.

Layout

Still in the catching-up mode with this post. In this image you can see the layout of track. It's pretty much what I had in Richmond. It's on a 4' x 8' plywood base, painted gray. You can probably see the seam indicating where it used to be in two long halves. I'll be trying to disguise that later with scenery. The only big difference is that the table is now much higher than it could be in the attic on Junaluska Drive. It was about 14-inches because of the short height in the attic, and now is about 36-inches. And the legs all have wheels, so I can re-position it fairly easily.

This layout is from a book I got years ago; the layout is called the "Eastern Grand Trunk." I've had all the track and all the cork roadbed for some time. A couple of features are the 2 loops on one and and three on the other. Right now the whole thing operates off a single power lead, so I can have a single engine going in one direction. Ultimately I'll be able to run one train clock-wise and a second counter-clockwise thanks to some fancy wiring. This layout also includes a turn-table and a small switching yard in the center plus a couple of spurs.

Once all the "stuff" is out of the middle of the layout there should be pretty good space to add some nice scenery. I'll post images of all that later.

The early years

This is the train I got as a kid. It's a Lionel O-gauge train. I think these are all original pieces. There used to be a space satellite associated with the flatbed car, but it's long gone. Several years ago I had a shop clean up the loco and get it working again and got new (un-rusty) track and a new power supply. It works pretty well these days: it throws sparks just like it's supposed to. Even though the Christmas tree was up on a table this year (because of the new cat), we put the train underneath.

Model...

...railroading, that is. I got an HO train when I was 10-11, along with some track. I got it going, but never did much with it. It got tucked away and moved about for years. I finally hauled it out when we lived in Richmond. I started putting together a layout in the attic of our house on Junaluska Drive. It never really got that far, though. I struck it and packed it all away and brought everything on the move to Black Mountain. Here at least we had a little bit of space to put the layout. I mentioned this year that I was ready to add some scenery to the thing, and stuff magically appeared under the Christmas tree! When I was showing Greg and Kristen the layout, Greg mentioned that I had never blogged about the set-up. So herewith the genesis.

This was the first set of four cars I got, a locomotive and three pieces of rolling stock. The first batch of track I had made a simple oval. I had no switches nor scenery. But it was easy to set up and get working. I did at one point buy a book of track plans and picked the one I wanted to work on. But it was years before I actually did anything with it. When I began working on the layout in Richmond, the locomotive was no longer running; I had to pay about $25 to get someone to work it over and get it back in shape (it is again no longer working and needs a bit of an overhaul). The access to the attic in Richmond was very narrow (I don't think I have a single picture of the set-up in Richmond). The layout I wanted to build required a 4 x 8 foot piece of plywood for the base; so I had to halve that length-wise in order to get it into the attic, and then fashion it back together once it was there. That took 2-3 years. Over the course of time I managed to gather all the cork roadbed and track needed to my layout and a few new pieces of rolling stock, as well as a second locomotive. All that took another 6-7 years. You get the idea. More later...

Mooresville, NC home re-discovered

The boys, all three of them, had a day off from school for Veterans Day yesterday. I decided to take us all to Charlotte for the day. There were several possibilities but it became apparent that the NASCAR Hall of Fame was the crowd favorite, even if it wasn't my first choice. The boys had a great time there. When we finally left there we still had some time available before we needed to start back home. We decided to seek out the fire and rescue museum, which was purportedly only a few blocks away. It took us only once around the block to realize that the "for sale" sign on that block was for the old C.F.D. Station 4 facility, which had once contained the museum; no longer. We were kind of bummed.

I decided to head north on I-77 (we had come to Charlotte via US-321, Gastonia and I-85) and see if I could find the house we lived in for a few years when I was 10-13 or so. Despite all the development around Mooresville, NC, I found the right street right away. According to my mom, it didn't even have a name back when we lived there, it must have been a rural route. Now it's Deerwood Lane. The houses that had been there when we were there looked remarkably familiar; there were several newer homes too. I drove to the end of the street and found our house. My folks had had it built new. Yes, it did look smaller than I remembered it.

There was a man mowing the lawn on a riding mower as we pulled up. I stopped the car and got out and waved him down. I gave him a very brief introduction and mentioned that I had lived in the house nearly 40 years ago. He got a puzzled look and stared off for a second and said that his family had been living there for nearly 40 years. It didn't take long to confirm he and his wife were the ones who had bought the place from my parents when we moved to Durham. Incredible. We then started in on some serious catching-up. He has three sons, one about my age. I mentioned that my dad had died a couple of years ago. They had lived in Morganton, NC before coming to Mooresville (about 45 minutes from our home in Black Mountain).

Small world. I had forgotten the camera (and phone) in our mad dash out the door in the morning, else I would have gotten a picture. I intend to write to him and follow-up and see if I can coax him into taking a picture for us. Most of the pictures I have of that house are on slides that I have not ever tried to convert to digital images. I may have to get busy on that sooner rather than later.



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