The Christmas story tells us that on Christmas Eve, a miraculous star appeared over Bethlehem as a portent of a new age. 2008 years later, an analogous – but less spectacular – sign at the Rainey household also marked the beginning of a new era. However, in our case, it was not a brilliant star in the heavens, but instead an exploding wine rack. Actually, “exploding” may be a bit of an exaggeration. But it was a very dramatic moment. For reasons still not explained, about 10pm on Christmas Eve, a wine rack in our basement toppled, expelling four bottles of some of the finest wines of Ohio. They crashed to the floor, shattered, and loosed a stream of alcohol and glass shards into the layout construction materials stored under my long-dormant S standard gauge layout, creating one heck of a mess! Clearly, someone was trying to tell me something. So the rest of the evening and much of Christmas Day was spent clearing out and disposing of the sodden materials and then dismantling large parts of the dormant layout. I had originally begun the layout about a year after moving from Oregon, using some surviving components of the Oregon S/Sn3 railroad. But as construction progressed, it had become more and more clear that the design maximized all the inaccessibility of my previous layouts while solving none of the problems. So it has remained inoperable and untouched for several years.
Meanwhile, my model railroad life has had some notable moments: the construction of my part of The Sn2 Crew layout with all the neat new scenery materials that have recently come to the market; the experience of the walk-in Sn2 Crew setup this fall in Dayton; and the NNGC layout tour in Portland, OR, with a neat double-deck layout, Fugate’s mushroom, and Dave Clune’s CCNG. And I mustn’t forget all the “fun” of putting DCC into the tiny Sn2 locos, which has convinced me both of the potential of the system and the headaches and learning curve for using it. After returning from Oregon in September, some sketching had begun on a new layout for the same space, while at the same time new display cases for my PRR S collection had been under very leisurely construction. The Christmas Miracle/Disaster (depends on whether you are the type that sees lemons or lemonade) convinced me that the time had come to take action. So since the crash (wine, not stock market), I have finished the display shelves, dismantled inappropriate parts of the old layout, completed the main line part of the layout design, begun constructing new benchwork, and laid the first 15 feet of track for The Ultimate Coal Valley Railroad. The concept is a short line (the Coal Valley Railroad, a line I have been modeling since the 1960s) that connects to the PRR at some comfortably vague location along the Bald Eagle or Elmira Branches. The PRR is represented by two medium-sized open staging yards (fixes that access problem!) connected by a 44" radius main line that passes through the industrial town and junction of Katharine Furnace. That should let me run my full roster of Pennsy steam (now completed by the recent acquisition of the long-sought L1 Mikado.) The Coal Valley will serve a couple of towns plus some rural industries along the line, including a coal mine (BTS Cabin Creek), a ganister quarry, and a sand plant (think Three Springs and Mapleton). The design is what I have dubbed a micro-mushroom. It is fully walk-in (via a drop-down and a nod-under) to accommodate my aching bones and should allow plenty of scope for some of the new scenery techniques. It is also fun that it will incorporate materials and surviving scenes from my Oregon, Dayton, and college-era layouts. (Nostalgia for the past can hopefully be tolerated in a geezer.) The whole thing has some key goals: * Debug my standard gauge rolling stock, including my fairly well-rounded Pennsy collection. * Learn to really install, tune and use DCC in nice big Pennsy tenders so I can return to the little Sn2 trains with more confidence. * Incorporate long DCC test tracks for both Sn2 and Sn3 (as part of one of the staging yards). * Provide a home for all the structures that still reside in boxes in various stages of undoneness. * Create some switching action.. * Earn my NMRA trackwork, electrical and civil engineering merit badges. * Make this my best-constructed layout yet. (I don’t think it will be my last layout. But at our age, one never knows.) * Entertain the grandkids. So tonight was a milestone. Trains ran – under DCC control – on the new track, a stage never reached on the layout that succumbed to The Flood. Wife Ginny was suitably impressed. “That’s fabulous,” she said, as a train tooted by, “but it is a diesel. I want more steam.” Financially, that sounds to me like the next best thing to a congressional earmark! It should be fun. The challenge will be to timeshare with the expansion of my Sn2 modeling in preparation for the NNGC in Hickory in 2011. Looks like that wine rack (a gift from North Carolina for a previous Christmas) will be the gift that keeps on giving! BTW, we are not in the market for additional miracles. The wine rack is now bolted to the wall so ferociously that it would take a direct asteroid hit to topple it again. Stay tuned. Lee Rainey **************A Good Credit Score is 700 or Above. See yours in just 2 easy steps! (http://pr.atwola.com/promoclk/100000075x1215855013x1201028747/aol?redir=http://www.freecreditreport.com/pm/default.aspx?sc=668072%26hmpgID=62%26bcd=De cemailfooterNO62) [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ------------------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/S-Scale/ <*> Your email settings: Individual Email | Traditional <*> To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/S-Scale/join (Yahoo! ID required) <*> To change settings via email: mailto:[email protected] mailto:[email protected] <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [email protected] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
