It's the little things

Hi Everybody,

Well, I certainly didn't mean to be away for a month, but I was. But I did do some projects during this time. First was gathering all my code 100 switch part together and get them ready to go on the railroad.

The first part to be worked on was the frog. I have decided to not power my frogs. One less thing to do. And with 8-wheel pick up on my locomotives I'm not concerned about dead spots. And more prototype operation to boot. When was the last time you saw a switch crew stop their locomotive beyond the frog and make the brakeman walk that far?

So, the frog is by Red Cliffs Miniatures. It's a #6 and it comes with joint bars on both rails on the wing rail end which is very nice. But they cause a problem when it comes to track power. So I cut the joint bars off, squared up all four ends, glued .010 styrene to the ends. When dry I carved the excess styrene off leaving the shape of the rail cross section. I then glued on plastic joint bars to the rails. Now when the four rails are slipped into the joint bars the frog will be insulated.

I've also started cleaning up the points and the head bars. I'm still playing with how to make them to operate from a wire coming up threw the roadbed from the switch motor. And I've got to find a clevis big enough to fit over the end of the head bar to reach the switch stand which will be made to change the target position when the points move.

What next. While watching the staining dry I noticed that the head blocks really weren't long enough. I had used 12 foot ties and when looking along the ties I realized they needed to be longer. I removed the two 12 ft head ties and glued in two 16 foot ties. Now with all that tie sticking out into open space, you know they're going to get broken. So I added a block of wood and homasote under them.

Now I don't have to worry about them.

Last week my friend Phil Opielowski and I went digging cinders. Yes, Real cinders from real steam locomotives. You see, the Ware River branch in the steam days used cinders for ballast on the branch.

That's about 5 gal. of cinders right there. Now I've got to reduce all that into scale ballast. Boy it's nice when you have friends in high places. The MassCentral general manager is a personal friend of both Phil and myself and he gave us permission to go on railroad property. Even showed up and BS'd with us for a while.

One of the other projects I've been working on is the new decking for the 3 deck girder bridge that will be down at the other end of the Barre section. The basic bridge was built by Phil and it is a compressed version of the deck bridge north of Gilberville on the Ware River branch.

Here it is drying after some staining. N-B-W's still to go on along with the rails. Will be spiking the rails onto the deck this week. I will be doing this spiking at the work bench.

I have found the caboose for the railroad. The Central Vermont Ry had three U.S.R.A wood, center copula, 4-window cabooses. These where sold to the St J & L C as their #80, 81, and I think 82 but I'm not sure. And why this caboose you ask?

You did ask, right?

I've always liked center copula cabooses, so naturally I was drawn to it. It is a very simple design without a lot of garnishing. As far as I know and can remember this car hasn't been produced in O Scale. And I like having something no one else has. So the search went out for a set of plans. The good people on the Proto48 group helped in finding a drawing by Chuck Yungkurth in the Jan. 1979 issue of Model Railroader. I was able to find a copy at "Railpub" on the net. When it arrived I took the drawing into work where I was able to blow up it in 1/48 scale. From that I am now drawing the caboose in CAD to which the construction drawings will be made from.

Looking at the car and figuring out how I want to build it, it became apparent that it would make a great candidate to be cut out on a laser cutter. There is a cutter at work which is used to cut plastic blanks for printing on. I've got to find out it's perimeters so I can design accordingly

Now the only thing I'm missing for the caboose is what the frame looked like. The Yungkurth drawing doesn't show very much. There's a trolley museum down in Conn. that used to own one of the CV vans, but don't know if they still do.

"Road Trip!"

See ya next time.