"Milepost 15": Abject Failure

Between cleaning up what's left of our cedar tree and other errands I haven't made much progress lately. I have to admit that my interest has waned for the past few weeks. This proved to be a good thing, because I was working on the helix before the pause. Coming back to the job after several weeks hiatus enabled me to see some flaws.

The code 80 track on the first level "buckled" somehow. This caused the track to expand out of its slot in places. Had I moved forward with construction I would have had a major repair on my hands. Since the levels still aren't assembled I simply had to pull up the track and relay it. Still in the process of doing that.

Another issue has come to light as I work on the second level. On this level I'm using the older Rapido flex track. I laid track #1 and let the glue dry. When I went back to check on things several days later I found most of the joints were "off". I thought it was a bad alignment, but I couldn't straighten them out. After a little investigation I found that all the joints were higher than the rest of the track...

Vertical Rise at Track Joint

Same joint Seen From Above

Turns out that all of the sections of the Rapido track are warped vertically...

Vertical Warp

I guess I was thinking the glue would hold the ends down. I have to pull each section up and bend it so it lays flat.

The helix wasn't the only source of aggravation. I tried some actual modeling. I had done a couple of N scale projects before and most of them seemed to come out "fair to middlin'" including a double ended PCC car...

Keystone Northern Boxcab

Keystone Northern FM Switcher

Logan Valley Double Ended PCC Car

So I took a shot at building a PRR N5e cabin car, a one of a kind "caboose" that resulted from rebuilding a wrecked N5. After several tries I ended up with this...

A Real PRR Class N5e Cabin Car

The Model

There was another try after this one, but even that was nowhere near acceptable, especially next to all those nice Bowser cars...

N5e Latest Attempt

It gets worse. After hunting around for an old Bachmann DD40 I finally found one on E-Bay. The trucks on the DD40 are exactly right for modeling Pennsy's BP60 "centipedes". I had envisioned something like this...