Model Railroading

It has been a while since I wrote about the model railroad project. I can say I have made progress.

My brother has been busy and has not been able to stop by since the first visit. I have been working in the train room though.

My brother and I each created our own railroads, with colors of the engines. My brother had the PUGET SOUND RAILROAD which is painted in orange and red. My TILLICUM RAILROAD is purple with a silver or white stripe. I chose that because I found an eastern railroad that had those colors and the engines were readily available at my local hobby shop. I just had to change the lettering.

We each had a second railroad, I had the KLAPATCHE BARGE company that was mainly working ports. My brother had the SKADGET RIVER RAILROAD which was a logging and mining railroad that operated steam.

Last week, I brought in from another part of the house a second two drawer unit, sorted through the railroad cars and put all the broken cars into the drawers I also sorted through my engines. Those that don't work are in the drawers also.

I found I have two GP-9 road switcher engines that run really good. Not at the same speed, but they can run slow, which is key to placing and picking up cars and making the day of running trains longer. They also pull a lot of railroad cars. One is painted for NORFOLK AND SOUTHERN and the other I stripped the paint off it.

I have three SW-9 yard switcher diesels, Two are Athern engines, a middle priced engine. My brother tried to improve how they run and slow them down and used re-gearing kits. These things run slow, but boy do they growl.

I have a 44 ton center cab yard switcher diesel made by quality engine maker. I once had it lettered, but weathering and other things caused the loss of any lettering on it. It was lettered for the Klapatche barge company.


I also have two F-units, painted for each railroad, that are made by Tyco. Tyco makes two different levels of engines. they make expensive engines, about a hundred dollars each, that run like watches. The other are what you get in the toy train sets. They either run full speed or stop, very little speed control. It happens that these F-units are the cheap type of engine.

The cheap engines likely will not be used, put into storage. Fighting engines that don't run perfectly is not worth our short time to model railroad.

With the cars taken off the layout, we still have way too many railroad cars on the layout. I should figure out how to put them on display. Of course, I really need to take everything out of the house and start over, either with a bigger house, or less stuff.

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Talking about less stuff, I spent this week cleaning the floor. The floor is almost completely clear. I have a little bit more to go. I mainly stopped when I filled the big box with the junk on the floor. I vacuumed the cleared section of the floor too which makes a big difference.
Since then, I picked through half the box, filling two kitchen garbage bags, one with stuff being tossed, and one with stuff being saved for now.

I need to do the rest of the box. The stuff that I will keep will likely go back into the box for now. I also need to finish the floor, which is mainly near the closet.

I will have to empty the vacuum cleaner, but when I do, I need to sort through the stuff sucked up as model railroad keepers can be small pieces and vacuum cleaners love them. Think of it as a archeological dig where they sift the sand in case they missed something.

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A few weeks ago, I picked up at a yard sale, crate like shelving. I had not decided where they would go. I finally decided to fit them into the blind corner of the closet, where I was storing the computer monitors. I then removed the "barges" my brother made and stuck them in the bottom two sections of the unit. This frees up room for storage bins on the shelving beneath the extension.

Our plan was to have interchangeable barges as part of our railroad operation. We would have sets of cars on them. Railroad cars would be taken from the trains and loaded on the barges as an actual operation. We would then lift the barge out and put it on a shelf, then slide in a new barge filled with cars and the engines would take the cars off them.

One problem all railroad layouts have, is that one only has room for a small amount of rolling stock. Every model railroad owner has more rolling stock than they have track space for. They end up with cars that get worn out from constant use, and cars that never get used because they are in storage. We had figured out years ago that having a barge operation is very intense, and enjoyable. One person could load and unload barges all day long. Our plan for a barge port on our railroad was intended to allow us to use all the railroad cars in our collection.

Handling the cars causes damage. added on details like hand rails and steps, along with couplers, end up getting broken. Also your carefully weathered finish and lettering gets rubbed off over time. The less handling a railroad car gets, the better.

We figured out that if we were to come up with a system where the cars are not handled at all, or at least very seldom, we would gain. The barges was a plan to solve that problem. The cars would be put onto the barge, a coupler on the rear end would keep the cars in place, along with a lid is slid down to keep them from jumping falling off if the barge is tipped.

The barge system would give us intense operating activities, which I will explain in detail in a future note, and would swap out our railroad cars so they all get the same amount of use. We would even be able to have special trains using cars that would only show up once in a long time, a circus train, a maintenance train, a train moving big equipment, and so on that one does not want to see on the railroad often.

Our problem with the barges we were making was that we never had the time, money, and at least back then, technology to complete the barges to be workable. This is one reason they are now being stored out of the way.