If this comes across as a grumpy rant, I’m apologizing now. It was one of THOSE kinds of weekends. Since the forecast was calling for cold and rainy, I decided to set up indoors, and told “the powers that be” that was the plan. The guys who normally empty out the buildings for shows had not done anything by Thursday, nobody was around, so I decided to move what pieces I could by hand and “work around” the rest.
By late Friday afternoon I had a pretty good start on the village… and the guys showed up to pull stuff out of the building… No, I’m not going to tear it down now…
Saturday morning, the club President says to me, “Why didn’t you set it up so people could walk through the building?”… Um, because I didn’t WANT to have to keep an eye on that much frontage, AND the building was still full of crap with no real safe way to WALK?
I brought “Old Reliable” #6 my modified LGB 2017D, and #12, the LGB Mogul I built as an ALCO from parts in her spiffy Pennsy inspired paint scheme.
Right off the bat I had transformer trouble. The one that had gotten damp a year ago decided it didn’t want to work at all. All I had fpr a spare was a Botchmann one from a bug mauler set… The transformer worked… for about 15 minutes. Then decided it wanted to keep tripping the overload… run for 30 seconds, then stop for a minute “Is that little one on a timer?” NO. I eventually unplugged it. To distract the folks from fixating on the train that wasn’t I redirected them to look for OTHER stuff… and was told I needed to paint a Waldo figure, too.
I had changed the Kalamazoo coaches over to B’mann passenger trucks, and decided to be lazy and left the B’mann knuckles on them… On a flat concrete floor, they kept uncoupling! After about the 4th or 5th time, I put rubber bands to connect the coupler shanks to keep the &$#@ things coupled together… All you guys who say how “ugly” and “unprototypical” hook and loop couplers are, please take note THEY DON’T HAVE THIS PROBLEM!!! The coaches will be converted to H&Ls as soon as i get them home again. Other than that, the sun came out and we were running trains. talking to folks and generally having fun. #12 had a bit more wheelslip than I had expected and only wanted 4 cars, rather than the 5 car “milk run” I had planned. Then about midafternoon I heard a funny 'click, click, click" as it went by, and half a lap later it stopped moving with a “whirrrrrrrrr”… Now, I went all over that gearbox when I assembled it from parts and hadn’t done more than test run it before this weekend, yet something failed. It’s sitting here beside me now. I’m hoping it’s an easy fix. That left good old #6… and it pulled the 5 car milk train with no complaints, at any speed we wanted from a crawl to a “Lionel” clip. (at anything over a crawl, I had a “butter” train… the milk car needs more weight, and better wheels… it wobbles, badly)
Sunday dawned damp cold and stayed that way. 4 layers and I was still shivering. Kim was camped out over a little cube heater. The spectators were smarter than us. They stayed home in droves! At about the point where we were ready to bag it and even say, “Never again!”, we had a nice little reminder WHY we keep doing this.
And those smiles made it all worth it… well almost all. I need to buy another Crest 5400 and they aren’t exactly cheap anymore.