First off, I will inform anybody who happens to be wandering in the
Houston area this weekend that the Houston S Gaugers will be setup for
Railroad Days in Rosenberg, Texas this Saturday. Rosenberg is located
on a now joint BNSF/UP mainline that sees a mess of trains all day long
and is located just outside of Houston. Rosenberg has a small museum
that sponsors the event. The most interesting item they have on display
(besides our abbreviated layout) is truss rodd'ed metal covered over
wood sided, former Grand Trunk Western business car. How it got here
and it's life story is fairly interesting.
Our club was able to set up and do some needed repair and adjustments to
a couple of modules. Some of that was productive, but we ran out of
time so we'll have to complete that work after the event.
After returning from the repair session, I still had some life in these
old bones so I did some trouble shooting on a tiny chunk of track on my
layout. My SW-1 was stalling on the crossover that has been place for
over 25 years. So I did the usual things like checking to make sure the
wires were all solidly soldered in place--that was fine, but I noticed
that one rail on the frog really wasn't soldered to it's mate, so I
decided to fill the area with solder and file out the flangeway. That
didn't help, so I checked out a 1+" of track that was part of the
crossing thinking maybe the railjoiner had filled with crud. A fine
piece of wire soldered as a jumper took care of that, but that didn't
help either. So I rechecked the wiring under the layout. I then
decided to add another drop from the frog to the Tortise and but that
too didn't help. Mind you, if I run the engine through the crossing a
moderate speed it will make it most of the time. I then gave up for the
evening to rethink things just a bit. Last night I decided to paint the
new solder joints to blend them. A few swipes with a track cleaner
removed the excess paint and by gosh the engine now ran through the
whole area. So overall, I've spent several hours trying to solve a
problem that 20 seconds with a bright boy would have solved!! I know
that Peter will get back at me now with his battery powered engines that
can run on pure dirt!
Bob Werre
PhotoTraxx
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