Our New Garden Railroad
At the moment, it isn't much of a garden after trampling it for a month while building the railroad but we plan to have various plants and flowers in this garden next season. The goal is to have enough tall flowering plants to block seeing the trackwork on the other side of the garden.
Here is a brief review of the sequence of events...
About ten years ago, I found a large scale set of trains for sale at a train show. The guy was asking $40 for the locomotive, tender, gondola, caboose, and track. He indicated that he had no idea whether it runs or not which usually means it does not run. Regardless, $40 for just one part of this set was a tremendous bargain.
I told him that my primary interest was just having a model to work on for a nice shelf display so this particular set interested me whether it runs or not. I gave him $20 in cash and then went to an ATM to get another $20. This was one of those rare times when I had no intentions of purchasing anything at a train show so I had no cash in my pocket. Fortunately, there was an ATM in the building. So, I came home with this set about ten years ago.
Sometime during the COVID pandemic I pulled this locomotive off the shelf to see if I could get it running. After cleaning up most of the locomotive and lubing it, she seemed to be running fine. Unfortunately, the sound system in it still was cheesy... the paint scheme was reminiscent of a Fisher-Price toy... and it lacked detail. I figured I could fix all of that so I decided it was time to move on to the next phase of this project.
Unfortunately, another two or three years had passed before I decided it was time to do something with this large scale train set.
For the past few years, I had been educating myself on new control systems that are wireless and battery powered. This was all completely new to me so there was a bit of a learning curve. I also definitely needed to brush up on my electronics knowledge and skills from my Air Force days.
Being battery powered meant that there would be no need to keep the tracks clean because the tracks would not need to provide clean electricity to the locomotive. I liked this plan for sure! Keeping tracks clean for smooth running is a frustrating, time consuming everyday task that we'd all love to eliminate and run trains instead. Installing battery power in this large scale locomotive was the way to go.
About two months ago, I ordered a new electronic control system that runs on battery power between 7 volts and 16 volts (I chose a 14.8 volt battery pack for this project) and is controlled via Bluetooth. This can be run with an app on either a cellphone or a tablet (assuming it is new enough, as always). I have a couple of tablets that fit the bill for this purpose so I was excited to get started on this new control system conversion.
I had to completely disassemble the entire locomotive in order to strip it of all existing wiring so, while it was disassembled, I chose to repaint it. This was the time to do the whole job. When I reassembled it, I weathered it as well. I added a lot of details to the cab. I also added marker lights, a backup light and a cab light.
In the meantime, whenever the weather and my health cooperated, I was outside working on the garden where we would install this garden railroad (this particular garden needed a lot of work anyway). My garden track plan had a large curved wood trestle bridge on one end of the garden and that looks great now that it is installed! All this work on and near the ground inflamed my knee joints again (long-COVID stuff) so I'm now having difficulty getting around and in great pain each day. I think it was worth it though! (Ask me again in a month or two... I might change my mind.)
I plan to add one more bridge in another area. I also plan to build a train station. I plan to add a snow shed on another curve. For now, I just have a passenger platform. Eventually, I'd like to add an old abandoned coal storage silo too. All that being said, I managed to get a lot accomplished in just one short month plus a month of planning.
I was ready to run the newly upgraded and rebuilt locomotive two days ago. Our two oldest grandchildren stayed with us that night so that was the night for the inaugural run. It ran smoothly, flawlessly, and beautifully!
Yesterday, all the grandchilden were here at the house for a barbeque so I ran the train again. This was a very successful project with a beautiful locomotive that runs exceptionally smoothly as a result and we're looking forward to another operating session soon!
Lukey was the train engineer all day (I never touched the controls) and he did a great job! He also was great at directing the younger grandchildren as necessary. I'll have to get out there by myself one of these days!
Here is a relatively short video from yesterday...
Fantastic!!
ReplyDeleteThanks Roger!
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