The first trains run

<Written November 13, 2012>

The ‘big day’ arrived quite unexpectedly.  I had started cutting the roadbed for the raised track areas on Sunday, and the process went much faster than I had anticipated.  Monday night I cut the last piece, and by Tuesday I was ready to lay the track back down.  Marklin’s rail joiners are not very good, so they also offer track clips that hold everything together.  The clips take a while to install, but with the help of a fellow Marklinist, Adrian Wegener, we were able to get the rail joiners installed.  At around 7:00 p.m. the first train made its way around the layout…

That’s a train of gondolas being pulled by a pair of BR80’s running tail-to-tail.  They are my only analog locos, and I expected the track to be dirty, having been out of use for many years.  But thanks to a quick swipe with a track cleaning brick, the trains ran almost flawlessly that first time around.  The double-heading insured that if one locomotive found a dead spot on the track, the other one would push it through, and then the front one would pull the rear loco through the same spot.  Neither locomotive had been run in a while, and I’m sure many of my readers can relate to the wonderfully comforting smell that came from the locos as the old motors burned off dust for the first few rounds.  Ah, the memories of my youth!

I wasted little time in unboxing every freight car I have and making a couple of long trains.  I hooked up my Intellibox to a transformer and unplugged the analog trafo.  My class 55 steam locomotive was hooked to a boxcar train I put together, while one of my V100’s took up position in front of the string of gondolas:

As I had suspected, the S-curve, initially an uninvited guest in the track plan, has quickly become my favorite part of the layout.  Sure, the curves are much too tight to be realistic, but I still enjoy the effect, especially when two trains pass one another.