The calendar turning to October this weekend, thoughts have turned to more than just how many lettuce beds to maintain into the winter, how much soup stock to put up or how best to manage the wood for another fireplace season.
Yes, thoughts also have turned once again to getting the N-scale train platform ready for its Christmas run.
The eight-line platform, featuring everything from passenger trains, to short- and long-haul coal and freight trains, to trolleys in a mountaintop community, bowed in 2012. It had great “runs” for that and the next three years.
Last year, however, “cat-tastrophe” struck. Wyeth and Winslow, the Tortie cat sisters, took it upon themselves to methodically de-wire much of the platform’s underside long before the first test runs and updates could commence.
There simply wasn’t enough time to fix it all and, for the first time in years, the engines remained in their metaphorical roundhouse and the rolling stock remained on its sidings.
Thus, the first order of business this year will be repairing that wiring and cat-proofing it. If that can be completed in timely fashion, then things will move on to the more mundane, but quite necessary, maintenance and, just perhaps, a few minor upgrades.
Track “spikes” have a nasty habit of working their way up to “derail height.” The landscaping always can use touch-ups; trees can be added here and others can be removed there. (Some that the cats clear cut also will be replaced. Ahem.)
New mountains can be added and old ones can be removed. A bit of insulating foam spray, allowed to cure, is the perfect material to carve new vistas. A wide putty knife powered by light hobby hammer taps quickly can render the highest peak into a wetland.
And, amazingly, no environmental impact study will be needed. Ahem.
Some years, the pre-season work can border on the bolder – such as adding an entirely new line (or lines). There’s nothing like more trains running more routes over freshly sculpted terrains. This year, however, will not be “some years.” Simply getting the platform back to past snuff will be the first order of this fall.
But however the work about to commence ends, the junior engineer doing it will have that model railroader’s smile of smiles on his face as the updated platform bows, hopefully just after Thanksgiving.
Then, it will be up to railroad security to keep Wyeth and Winslow at bay, off the platform itself, to prevent what could be an even greater “cat-tastrophe.”
Colin McNickle is a senior fellow and media specialist at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
