October 2009

Another weekend with nothing to do

            Seeing my sister off at the station was with mixed feelings.  One, it was a great visit.  A time, long overdue, to catch up on the larger families comings and goings.  And two, it left me alone again to stew over being alone again.

            So I figured I’d wander over to the bike shop and see what “Crotch Rocket” Ricky was up to.  He was always trying to sell me one of those things and it seemed to be my task in the relationship to find new ways to say no.  Had I ever said yes I probably wouldn’t have been dead by now.  Roads around here were mostly loose gravel, or just plain bad, and they wouldn’t get any better under a speeding two wheeler.  At 50 miles per hour it was tough staying upright in my big old Jeep.

            I’ve mentioned this before but it’s worth mentioning again.  All the good figures aren’t done by the railroad modeller industry.  Over half of mine are from the automobile world.  I even have a couple of military models.  I just have to be selective regarding clothing and of course a little paint won’t go astray.  All of the bikes are from that other hobby as well.

            The bike shop is ‘in front’ of visitors as they get into the basement.  It’s more fun to have trains move behind the structures just like in real life.

            Rick’s dad was around the back of course.  Bert had fallen asleep under the window while listening to the music roaring on the inside.  Never even finished his third beer but the warm sun and that old coach seat soon did him in.  His old buddy Ernie, over dressed for the occasion as usual, was reading yesterdays paper.  At one time his name was featured prominently in the Journal’s social pages.  Not so any more but he could still afford to live in Winter Valley on just his OAP.

            The bike shop (in my story - formerly a welding shop and before that a blacksmiths shop) is the first building at the bottom of the stairs so I wanted a build a scene – front, side and rear.  I wanted to have a verity of details that weren’t out of a catalogue so it set a unique tone of ‘completeness’ for the whole railroad.  There was even enough room for a beat up car and a bit of a junkyard.

My plans on sharing ale with the guys were interrupted.  There was a train sitting idol at Alien’s Cut up in the High Pass.  While negotiating an S curve, the crew had seen smoke about 25 cars back and brought her to a stop. This was bear country and although the snow was soft and deep in places, both members of the crew walked along the track for a look-see.  At least one bearing on an old 40-foot flat car had broken down.

Summit Siding was 2.2 miles back according to the signpost.  In front was the long grade down into Winter Valley and no one wanted trouble there.  After clearing it with the office it was decided they could let things cool down and very slowly push her all back up the hill.  One man with a radio would ride the nearby ballast hopper and at the first sign of real trouble bring the whole adventure to a halt.  A new engine and crew would then have to take the train apart from the rear and pull the failed car back into Colder on it’s own.

            One of the real challenges of railroading in a basement or a room, in the larger scales anyway is finding a way to disguise the return to start.  This is true even on those railroads that supposedly operate point to point.  The best of those I’ve seen still have a way to get trains around.    This canyon scene is showing a train exiting the 35-foot siding hidden under Colder on the south wall.  An ‘S’ curve will take the train into the shop tracks at Grande Prairie.

            Well, that didn’t work!  The guys didn’t get half a mile up the grade when it seemed the axle would fail completely.  Worked stopped and it looked like they’d be camping out for a few hours while we got a rescue party up there.  CN had a pair of SW1200’s in Hudson so it wouldn’t be that long.

            The yard and the small workshop at Colder were never intended as a railway repair facility and so it wasn’t properly equipped to change out a wheel set.  An overhead crane was moved out of semi-retirement and set up over an unused siding. A ‘best of a bad bunch’ pair of wheels was already on the car, if needed, and bearings could be dropped off by the next train though - east or west.

            The three-track yard at Colder usually offers an inbound general freight siding, a main through track and a siding for filled oar cars.  Empties are spotted on a spur right at the mine site.   All of the ballast is composed of crushed ‘scenery’ material that I pulled out of the side of a local mountain.

            The SW1200rs in the scene is one of a pair that resulted from a complete rebuild of USA Trains great little NW2’s.  The prototypes rumbled right past my back door every day during my two-year tour at CFS Lowther in Northern Ontario

            8124, the last of the original order of our GP9’s, and the most recently overhauled, brought the old maintenance car home to Winter Valley.  It would have to stay here over night and be inspected by the shop crew before moving out at the next opportunity.  The wheel sets were only being shipped for scrap anyway.  They’d done their job and were now simply beyond repair.

            The car itself would be a part of the sale.  The ex-CNR workhorse 662588 served for years as an idler car on the WV before we gave up on maintaining the big crane.  It was just easier to have one brought in when the worst happened.

            It’s true.  My first large-scale locomotive was an Aristocraft RS3 all dressed up in CPR maroon and gray.  It served me well and I stand behind it as a great 1st engine.  But my prairie shortline was initiated in N scale and modelled on the CN line between Edmonton Alberta and the big air base at Cold Lake.  As a result, GP9’s and RS1200’s are the order of the day. 

            So as soon as I had the layout in order my next ‘order’ was for three of the USAT award winners.  There were two more to follow.  All of them custom painted in the original 1972 Winter Valley scheme and numbered in the 8100 series.  As time moved on the WV acquired a pair of SD40-2’s that were bumped from main line service.

            On the way to work the next morning the staff brought me up to date on the faulty bearing issue.  I’d have to contact the maintenance team at Colder and arrange compensation for our use of their crew and equipment.  We’d still have been stuck up there without them.

            Back on track again, a quick look outside my office window reminded me that September was almost over.  Tourists were going home and taking their campers and the kids with them.  I really liked the hustle and bustle of the all too brief season.  New faces on the streets and in the stores.  New people to talk to.  It was going to be a long cold winter with Loree’ still overseas…….

            The elevator in the background is a model of the last prairie skyscraper in Oak Lake Manitoba.  It was built on my deck about 9 years ago and spent it’s formative years outside on the ledge layout I had carved out of the mountainside.  It’s been much happier inside and the scene I built around it, as above, is pretty close to the scene one would get right now in Oak Lake – had the elevator still been there.  The small road, the old tree in someone’s front yard, the siding with an engine idling away.  All were there except that engine was a CPRail SD40-2 of course.  Call I artistic license.     
 

See you all at www.mylargescale.com