The Sandcastle

17 August 08 - 15:38

Playing with trains

For us, one of the advantages of being in the Minneapolis area is we get to go to model railroad operating sessions.  We've been to two of them in the last two days.  For those of you who have no clue what that means, here's some help.

Those of of who build, or have built, model railroads often think of them as real railroads.  Thus, we like to see them operate as if they were real railroads.  That means trains have a reason for being.  Train crews pick up and drop off cars at industries, sort those cars at freight yards into other trains, and drive those trains to somewhere else.  To do this in an organized manner we have timetables, and dispatchers, and clocks that run faster than normal ones so we can do a day's work in an evening or afternoon.

Here's an example of a model railroad industry.  [!-- error: could not popup flour.jpg. File does not exist --] This is Shamrock Flour Mill on our former Cedar River Terminal Railroad.  It has five tracks with each track having a specific use.  Some are where cars get cleaned out before being loaded with flour.  Some load bread flour and some load pasta flour into covered hoppers to go to processing plants.  Another loads bagged flour into box cars to go to grocery wholesalers.  It is important that the model railroad operator spot the right car on the right track; the waybill for that car tells him which car holds what commodity and a spot diagram tells him which track gets that commodity.

Here's Dave and our friend Bruce working Cimarron Yard on the Sierra Western Railroad.  They'll spend all evening making up and breaking down trains to travel across this basement sized railroad. [!-- error: could not popup sw_yard.jpg. File does not exist --]

And here's a clock that has been modified to run at a speed of about 4.5:1 so we can work a 12 hour shift in one evening.  [!-- error: could not popup pat__tom.jpg. File does not exist --] In front of that clock are Roadmaster Tom on the right and his assistant, my good friend the late Pat Walker, who you already know as the one who introduced me to geocaching.

If you are interested in reading more about our model railroading through the years, please visit http://www.sandsys.org/ and click on Model Railroading.  For those of you who have not yet read the backstory about our RV preparations and want to do so, click on the same URL then click on Travel then Camping.

TTYL,
Linda

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