Since building the layout, there has been a slight incline on the storage tracks to the left of the traverser in the Canadian Pacific Parkdale yard end of the layout. what this means, is that any freight cars I try to park here, have the undesired habit of rolling back onto the traverser, or worse, into the opening when its moved. I finally grew tired of this, as I am planning for a series of operating sessions in late February and into March with friends, and stopping this was on the “must do” list to make friends lives easier in being able to spot cars here as they work in the yard before heading onto the layout.
Runaway rolling stock, never a good thing!
So, what to do about this? I wanted something that was both simple to produce, but would be easy for operators to use as a wheel chock to stop cars rolling. In looking at it, I realized that I have lots of brass tube and bar stock, and cutting three short sections of tube, and drilling an angled hole into the ballast and underlying foam, I could glue in the tube, and then cut a section of brass bar with a hook on the end produce effective and unobtrusive stops that are easily pulled to move cars.
Before and after, freight cars with a bad habit of rolling away, now with three brass flags to hold cars in place.
For the moment, they are still unpainted brass. I will almost certainly at some point after I am sure I am happy with them, paint them in some way to help hide them. This is not an area of the layout that will have lots of photos taken, so usability is slightly more important than them vanishing completely. I may look to get some fake derails or something to help draw the eye away, though the derail posts may draw attention more than help hide, so I’ll have to think more. I suspect any further work on these won’t happen until after March when I see how the couple of Ops sessions go and people actually working with them and if they work OK.
No more rolling away!
So on we go with working on layout projects and preparation for operating sessions. Lots of little updates to come here as I continue to plug away and find time to write things up over the next couple of weeks.
Musings on my Model Railroading Addiction 