Chasing the Forney

Following a nail-biting series of monsoonal thunderstorms sandwiching long bouts of drizzle, Flagstaff has dried out enough lately to allow for train running without major track cleaning efforts. It was a good test to see what the railroad could handle, including three extreme downpours with hail and the requisite lightning that treats ponderosa pine trees like match sticks (and, incidentally, knocked out our garage door opener, a problem still to be solved). Before the railroad's appearance in the back yard, I had always welcomed as much rain as we could get, given our consistent drought throughout the Southwest. Now I find myself torn, intently watching the right-of-way out the window to see how much ballast is floating away during a downpour. Even after all that, I re-ballasted a few sections and shored up some poorly contained areas last week, and the railroad is in great shape. Sections of it are even showing signs of being embedded into the landscape with an overgrown appearance, which is what I was hoping for in certain areas. Tonight provided a relaxing opportunity to run a couple of trains in a leisurely way before the sun went down. The action tonight featured the newest addition to the Ponderosa Lines' roster, an 0-4-4 Forney with its two-car set and an added G&RGW coach. The battery for the Forney's power is in the trailing passenger car behind the tender - a required feature due to my decision to rely on battery power rather than track wires. I am waiting for my first fusion generator, but for now I need to rely on traditional batteries. As for the sun, I noticed quickly that the lighting was great tonight, so I grabbed Linda's camera phone nearby and did some railfanning. Here are the shots.

Click on the photos for larger images. Click again on the larger images for the full-size photos, if you dare. The first image below is the actual map of the Ponderosa Lines Railway, as it now exists with place names.)

Above: Just beyond the trestle for Palmer Gulch

Above: Getting close to Viterbo in the late evening sun, making the final run back home to Paradise.

Above: Station Stop at Blumenthal, one of two passing sidings.

Above: Rolling up Angel's Flight, toward (the other) White Pass

Above: Exiting White Pass (the highest point on the line, hence the name), through the "forest".

Judgment Day

One ongoing mystery was solved today, at least as an initial test case. How would the pristine, groomed railroad and its ballast survive its first rain storm? I thought we would have a month or more without any wet stuff coming down, during which I could continue to live in my dreamland where the outdoors behaves like the indoors, albeit without a roof and occasional wild and domestic animals scurrying through. Two nights ago a skunk bumbled across the main line toward the fence after setting off the motion-detector flood lights. In any case, today was Judgment Day, as I later told Linda as we stood on the balcony overlooking the layout. According to a lady we saw later this evening, it had rained, and even hailed, for about five minutes, as some scattered showers moved through due to a late-season Pacific storm. Very rare in June. So we got a chance to see how the railroad would react.

I had read a forum post (MyLargeScale.com) in which the author advised that rain on a garden railroad is not the "same" rain (I'm paraphrasing, probably poorly) that the typical outdoor environment expects to receive on a regular basis. The trains are still miniature in terms of scale, so the rain drops that actually strike the garden railroad are effectively much larger - perhaps 6-8 scale inches across. That's like having the impact of water balloons striking our homes and yards, since the particle size of our ballast is much smaller than that of prototype railroads. So the question remained in my head: How would the Ponderosa Lines react to veritable water balloons? At first, it looked like a mess, as I shook my head overlooking my hard labor for the past two months. Water had indeed splashed ballast particles up ONTO the rails themselves, which was perhaps the most annoying aspect. It also mildly pock-marked the roadbed and ballast beside and between the tracks, making it appear to have a rougher texture than how I laid it down. As I tested the track itself with my hands, it was clear that the railroad itself was still solidly embedded into the roadbed, so the rain hadn't actually dislodged the track. So, the most prominent concern was essentially how to clean the track. I took our trusted "Swiffer" tool, though the wet swiffer pad turned to mud pretty quickly. Finally, I took a dry swiffer pad, attached it to my 2-foot long level stick with a rubber band, and dragged that along the rails. Once satisfied that the bulk of the matter was now off the rails, I braved my LGB switcher with two gondola cars out ahead of it to hopefully "polish" the rails. This seemed to work ok, and the trackage is now somewhat back to normal. I don't know how the "track power" guys do it, as I can't imagine keeping the track clean enough to provide reliable power from the rails. But as Linda suggested, I might be too anal, striving too valiantly for the perfect track "interface" with my trains (even though the locos run on battery power). This latter notion is hard to refute.

So, we have a preview of our upcoming "Monsoon season," which Linda is convinced will be one of the wettest on record now that the railroad is partly installed. We then imagined how we look forward to seeing a White Pass passenger car floating down into the neighbors' yards and having to collect my trains when they finally make landfall. So, the railroad survived its first downpour. We'll see if I have to go further and build a Noah's Ark on rails to prepare for worse.

First two-train meet at Blumenthal

With trackage laid all the way to the town of Blumenthal, it was time to do some railfanning on the Ponderosa Lines. The passing siding at Blumenthal allows trains to "turn" as well as pass one another upon arrival. Here are some photos of the action, the first time two trains have been dispatched to the mid-point town of Blumenthal in the same day. A new favorite for railfans along the line, you will see plenty of images of the line's longest trestle, over Palmer Gulch. The origin point for both trains is Boulder Point (you will see why Linda renamed the town of House Rock  to represent this place). As of late June, Boulder Point station includes a reverse loop, house track, and siding. Also, for two weekends we have adorned the right-of-way and vicinities with some scattered vegetation to actually represent the "garden" aspect of the "garden railroad". Most plants are native or regional varieties, or at least drought-tolerant plants of some kind. They range from various junipers and lavinder flowers to sedges, grasses, and penstimons. Still learning about plant names, but we are getting fairly familiar with the types of plants that do well here at 7,000 feet elevation. I have to admit that, although my true interest is designing railroads and laying track, it was like going to a candy store when we paid a visit to our local "Native Plant and Seed" company here in town to start deciding on some plants. We pretty much decided to call it quits after one wagon-full load of plants made its way to the car. Numerous rocks that appeared naturally in the yard (and through right-of-way excavations) considerably added to the landscaping scenes (with Linda's enjoyment of throwing them around to make them look "natural"...) So, as of late June, our garden railroad is looking like the term suggests. Much more than I had anticipated for this summer, yet plenty to do the next couple of years on the Ponderosa Lines! The plan is to complete the entire single-track main line this summer, to the "end" of the line at Paradise (please see previous post labeled "Concept and Maps".