Goat Crossing: 03:28 – 04:07

Running #420, the Upbound Freight, on the Daylight Pass Railroad

October 20 1954: 03:28 – 04:07

The tiny sliver of moon is high in the eastern sky, but its light too feeble to reach into the shadows between the sparse and scattered electric lights of Daylight. It will be well over an hour yet before the sky brightens enough to start defining the ridgelines and peaks to the east, nearly three hours until sunrise, and longer than that before the shadow of the mountain is chased back far enough for the sun’s rays to fall directly on the streets of Daylight.

From town the distant notch of Daylight Pass, some 40 plus crow-miles to the east, is visible and there are 2 couple-three-week long periods during the year when the sun rises in the gap of the pass,* sending early beams down to the streets, but late October is not one of those periods.

*Originally the pass, notching the mountains to the east, and town, nestled down on the edge of a wide, arid basin, were both named Gunsight but around the turn of the century an unofficial alliance of business and civic leaders that pretty much controlled things; back then called Bishop’s Hiccups after their titular if not official leader, and now, half a century later and still pulling strings, known as the Shifty Fifty; felt that such a name, especially here on the fringes of where the Lincoln County Wars took place not all that long ago, didn’t send the kind of message they wanted for their community so the names of both were changed to Daylight, though it took almost 10 additional years to change the official name of the post office.

In the pre-dawn of this Wednesday morning the streets are mostly deserted as Tom Kelso rumbles through town long before most of its approximately 7000 citizens have slapped blindly at their alarm-clocks, but he doesn’t mind the early hour – well, he doesn’t mind it too much anyway.

Rolling out of his bed at 03:00 six mornings a week three mornings a week to run the Daylight Pass Railroad’s freight train either up or back down the mountain, doesn’t exactly top his list of favorite things, but having a steady, predictable call-out sure beats working the Southern Pacific’s first in, first out, pool out of El Paso with its wildly unpredictable call-times and mix of assignments and routes, including mainline trips that often resulted in outlawing at 16 hours out on some remote siding or other and having to lay over for 10 hours to become legal again, catching whatever accommodation, and food, might, or might not, be available while he waited out his time and could mark up on the board again.*

*If lucky he might “deadhead”, or ride company provided transportation, road or rail, to his next assignment. Lucky because, though the time spent doing so counted as rest even though it was often far from restful, it also, by union agreement, counted as paid time. But deadheading only happens if it suits the company’s needs, which isn’t very often.

No, compared to that schedule, which he worked for 16 of his 21 years* with the Southern Pacific, his regular assignment on the Daylight Pass freights, train #420 heading up the mountain every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday and #421 back down again on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, is his dream job.

*His first 5 years with the SP was spent working yard turns, hard work, same boring scenery every day, and with low pay, as he built enough seniority to get on the road pool.

Sure, compared to working the Southern Pacific, (SP) the Daylight Pass (DP) route is short and the engines light, both of which lower his pay quite a bit, but he still takes home more than the average working stiff, more than enough to satisfy his modest needs, and now he has a routine to anchor his life on, more routine than he’s had most of his working career.  

So that’s why this morning, hours before most will make their first shuffling, snuffling, and scratching trip to the bathroom, he’s content to roll through the peace and quiet of the night as he drives the orderly, north-south, east-west grid of Daylight’s streets, occasionally cut through by one of the shallow, rock-lined dry-washes that handle (most) of the monsoon rain runoff coming down out of the mountains.

He’s soon out of town and with window down and elbow propped he drives through the overnight calm of the basin, headlights boring a hole through the dark as he transits a shrinking bit of desert scrub on the nicely paved road. The rumble of engine, and whine of tires keeps him from hearing the night-sounds, but there is, after the long basin summer, an unaccustomed hint of chill to the air and a bit of sweetness has been added to the usual earthy smells carried to him by the wind wiping and snapping at the open window. Just as the lights of Goat Creek Yard come into view he starts passing the looming shadows of commercial construction sites and partially built tract-houses that mark the burgeoning village, a bedroom community they’re starting to call it, of Goat Crossing.

Before Edward Bishop, who would eventually be majority owner and president of the Daylight Pass Railroad, bought the failing concern just after the turn of the century, Goat Crossing was a ranch with its headquarters perched on a flat above Goat Creek. There was just enough water and feed in the area to support goats through the winter, as long as they weren’t too thick on the ground and moved to the summer range in the hills above when the basin dried up under the intense summer sun, but the remoteness and the falling demand for goat-meat in favor of beef, which the parched land couldn’t support, eventually drove the Goat Crossing Ranch into selling everything cheap.

Though Edward was already planning on his railroad, at this point he was keeping that information to himself while he bought up properties along the route a few trusted, and highly supervised surveyors had mapped out. Knowing the potential value of his mostly speculative properties closer to Daylight, still called Gunsight back then, he bought the somewhat remote Goat Crossing Ranch because the ranch headquarters was sitting on the perfect location for his main yard and service areas. He didn’t necessarily want all the extra land that came with the sale, but it was a package deal.

Though highly successful, not everything Bishop did worked out the way he anticipated, and this was one of them. But in this case it was a good thing. After tearing down the ranch headquarters and building the Goad Crossing Yard in its place, for decades he held onto the surrounding land that came as part of a package deal with the sale of the ranch and did nothing with it, mostly because everyone, including him, thought it was pretty much worthless, but with the population of the area growing amid the post-war economic boom Edward’s son and successor found himself sitting on highly desirable land with easy access to Daylight.

Slightly modifying the business model his father had developed for Lincoln Holdings, the real-estate arm of the family businesses, Charles had platted out a township and was selling off residential lots to home developers while retaining ownership of the commercial land and leasing it for development as shopping, restaurant, and other service-type businesses.

But that is of little interest to Tom who is headed to the Goat Crossing Yard this morning because the only scheduled trains that run the full length of DP’s Daylight to Three Creeks route are the Expresses. Four a day, two of them originating at the joint Southern Pacific & Daylight Pass Depot in Daylight and terminating 65.3 miles away and nearly 4500 feet higher at the mining town of Three Creeks, the other two simultaneously running the reverse of that route, one up and downbound pair in the early morning and another in the early evening.  All the rest of the DP’s scheduled trains, the Ore Turn, Pipeline, and Freight, originate or terminate at the Goat Crossing Yard, 5 miles outside of Daylight.

 Overnight the busy switcher, a 2-6-0 mogul with a low tender for improved rearward visibility, in addition to assembling or breaking down the various consists at the Goat Crossing Yard, also does the transfer run to and from the SP interchange track near the Daylight depot at around midnight,* during which it handles any other freight switching necessary in and around Daylight, though there usually isn’t much since most of that business is handled by the Class-1 Southern Pacific Railroad with its connections to the rest of the country.

*Because every railroad has to pay per diem on any foreign car still on their property at midnight there is always a mad rush to get any outbound cars to the outbound interchange track, the other guy’s property, before midnight, and at the same time the other guy is shoving cars onto the inbound interchange to dump them on you. It’s like a game of tag being played for money.

Seven nights a week the overnight switcher also shuttles the ore loads, left at Goat Crossing late in the afternoon by the Downbound Ore Turn, through town to the Fresnel Processing plant on the north side, dragging empty ore jennys back to Goat Crossing for #310, the Upbound Ore, to haul back up to Three Creeks in the morning.

And three days a week the day switcher hauls the empty tank cars brought down the mountain by the Pipeline, over to the Bayley Fuels terminal, also on the north side of Daylight, dragging loaded tank cars back to the Goat Crossing yard to be made up into the Upbound Pipeline which departs just before midnight on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, hauling the fuel needed for the Six Peaks Power Plant up there in Three Creeks.

* Mon, Wed, Fri   **Tue, Thu, Sat

At the end of his pre-dawn drive Tom leaves his 16 year old Ford pickup, once forest-green, now faded to more of a pastel lime with hints of russet around the edges, in the crew parking lot among a mixture of vehicles belonging to other railroaders. Because railroading is not a 9-to-5 job there’s always a mixture of vehicles here in the lot.

The truck was brand new when they bought it and cost almost as much as the El Paso house he and Mary shared.  The austerity of the nearly decade long depression was only just starting to ease at the time, so spending the money was a risky extravagance, but everybody that read a paper or listened to the radio knew war was coming and had heard the speculation that war would mean no new vehicles, at least not for civilians. Given the amount of time he spent away from home Tom didn’t want to have to worry about Mary trying to cope with their already old and mechanically sketchy car for that long as she shuttled back and forth to her teaching job at the elementary school on those days when weather, or her health, always a little touchy, precluded riding her bike, so they splurged.

Over those 16 years he has changed the oil 48 times, rebuilt the engine once, and replaced the clutch twice. And he will grudgingly admit that at higher speeds her running-gear is feeling a little loose and wobbly and the shifter is getting sloppy, but buying a new one, like some have suggested, especially fellow crew members catching a ride with him back to Daylight after completing a run, is something he is in no rush to get around to. When they bought the truck it was the first new vehicle for both him and Mary; and in the case of Mary, her last; so the thought of replacing the old green rattle-trap felt – well, disloyal. Like breaking his vows somehow. After all, he’d already given away much of their shared belongings and sold the El Paso house when he made the move back here to Daylight, so parting with the truck too just doesn’t bear thinking about. Not yet anyway.

Walking into the crew lounge tucked like an afterthought at the end of a hallway in the yard office, Tom drops his carryall unceremoniously on the worn and cracked floor with a heavy thud.

Calling this dim and stuffy space something as lofty as a ‘lounge’ might be gilding the pig since in reality it’s a cramped room that, in addition to a new floor, could have done with a coat of fresh paint years ago.

All it has going for it is one well-stained door, especially around the knob where work grubbed hands, bare and gloved, have left their mark, one window that looks out across the RIP track to the blank side of the roundhouse and only opens or closes with a well-placed thump from the heel of a hand, a groaning fridge that for the past year sometimes rattles like something inside has panicked and is trying to get out until someone gets up and gives it a good whack on the left side, a half-dozen miss-matched chairs, most with padded seats that have had the stuffing pounded out of them, one scared table that, despite its looks, has proven to be up to the abuse of several butts plopping down on it at the same time, (Sometimes there’s more people than chairs in here.) and an old gas stove with the ever-present coffee pot gradually distilling the liquid inside down to bitter mud despite being set on the smallest burner which is turned down as low as it will go without going out. (And for some reason, there’s always been an empty blue-enameled double-boiler pot with a ladle stuck in it sitting on the other back burner that, in the three and a half years he has been using this lounge, Tom has never seen anybody use.) In other words, a typical railroad crew-lounge not much different from the ones he used during the SP years.

For the moment there is plenty of seating since the crew of the Upbound Ore have just left to go get their train ready for its 04:40 departure. They have, in addition to a haze of cigarette smoke, left behind Jake Mills and Dean Short, both slumped with not-yet-fully-awake immobility in chairs pushed up against a wall.  Jake and Dean are part of the Freight’s usual crew, Jake being the fireman and Dean the rear trainman. (The fact that the head trainman, Ronald King, hasn't joined the crew in the lounge is not unusual. Ronald prefers open spaces.) This crew have worked together for quite some time now, (In fluid world of railroaders that means anything over three months.) though on the first run of the week, Monday/Tuesday, and the last, Friday/Saturday one or more of the regular crew will occasionally take themselves off the board in order to get a three-day weekend. When that happened someone off the extra board will be called to fill in, but it is almost always the core crew together for the Wednesday/Thursday run.

Ignoring the burnt coffee (The battered stainless-steel Stanley in his carryall is filled with his own hastily brewed concoction. True, at best it would be considered only halfway decent coffee, but it sure beats the crap out of the stuff in the crew-lounge!) he pulls one of the chairs up to the table and it squawks harshly against the floor as his weight settles into it. He shoves a couple overflowing ashtrays, one still emitting a thin streamer of smoke, to the opposite side of the table then flips through the paperwork Harold Sneed, the graveyard dispatcher, bock-operator,  and crew clerk all rolled into one wrinkled old package, (Harold has to be at least 80!) had handed him as he signed-on in the crew book.

As is his routine, he first checks the engine assignment and sees they have 1428 today. One of the C-14 class 2-8-0 Consolidations that are predominate on the DP. To a former Class-1 railroader the C-14’s seem like tiny little play-things with their diminutive, almost-pick-it-up-and-put-it-in-your-pocket, 46” drivers and compact 21” diameter cylinders, but with the DP’s sharp curves and light rail anything larger tends to tear the road up.

A month ago, while heading up the Downbound Pipeline, this engine had a flue failure right at the rear flue sheet.  Though it doesn’t really matter where it failed because the result of any kind of flue failure, as opposed to the more common and tolerable flue leak, is a doused fire and smoke, soot, water, and steam roaring with a sound only God could match, not only out the stack, but around the gaps in the firebox doors and through the peephole above. The fireman bailed out while the engineer slammed the throttle closed and grabbed for the brake, trying to push it through service and into emergency, even though there is no emergency on the DP’s old Consolidations.

Being a relatively light consist running slow on the gentle downgrade between Cutoff and Rockhouse, it didn’t take the train long to squeal, scrape, groan, hiss, shudder, and slide to a stop. The fireman, probably a little embarrassed that he bailed so quickly on his engineer, though no one blamed him because every engineman, whether they admit it or not, is scared to death at the thought of being steamed alive by a boiler failure, had to run around the head-end and climb the right hand ladder to pry the engineer’s hand off the brass lever of the brake whereupon he threw him unceremoniously off the footplate and jumped down after him. After all, there was still steam and hot water snapping and clawing around the edges of the fire-doors like an angry badger.

The engineer, protected by his gauntlet-gloves and heavy denim overalls and jacket, had some minor burns on his left arm and slightly more serious but not life-threatening burns on the left side of his face, (He wasn’t a pretty man in the first place so no big deal.) but was bleeding, a lot, from where his head hit the sharp ballast when he couldn’t keep his feet under him after being thrown off his own train. The fireman, despite jumping from a moving train, had nothing more than a sprained shoulder, and that was probably from trying to throw the hefty engineer like a baseball in his haste to get back off the engine.

The conductor, who had run up the train to find out why his coffee pot had been thrown clear to the other end of the house-car, quickly sized up the situation and had the fireman run back around the head-end to shut off the fuel flow in case the fire wasn’t completely doused and grab some fusee’s and the lantern from his seatbox. By now the steam was almost exhausted so the angry badger was reduced to a little spitting and some minor hissing.

With flagging equipment in hand the fireman headed down the track to protect the head end. (The pipeline operates with a four-man crew, so there was no head-trainman to do the flagging.) The conductor also sent the rear-trainman (The DP doesn’t have flagmen, switchmen, and brakemen, they’re all rolled into the single job title of trainman.) back up the track to flag the rear, while he himself tied down the hand-brake on several of the cars because the air-brakes, though set quite tightly right now, could eventually bleed down and release on their own if they were stuck here too long.

Fortunately the Pipeline, with its string of tank cars, dangerous enough at any time but most volatile when empty such as on this downbound run, not only stayed on the track during the hard stop, but is also scheduled during the midnight hours which made it the only train on the line for the next 5 hours, so traffic wasn’t tangled up too bad as a relief engine dragging a tool-car and some machinists was sent up from Goat Crossing* to get the crippled train down the mountain. But that was only after the conductor, now convinced the bloody engineer wasn’t going to die on him, walked the nearly two miles back to Cutoff to have the station agent call down to let the dispatcher know what happened.

*During the heydays of the 20’s and 30’s there would have been at least one helper engine sitting at Big Timber, along with a section crew which would have been much closer, but these are not the heydays of the Daylight Pass Railroad.

In the days of the telegraph he used to be able to scramble up the nearest pole, or more likely, send a trainman up the nearest pole, to hook onto the wire alongside the tracks and use his portable key to send and receive messages, but today, the age of the modern phone, that isn’t possible, at least here on the DP where portable phones have not been issued yet. Progress isn’t always for the better!

By the time the relief engine had gotten to the site and the machinists had removed the main rods and disconnected the valve gear so the crippled engine could be drug down to Rockhouse and shoved out of the way into the old Bishop Summer Estate stub track, most of that 5 hours had been used up, leaving just enough time for the relief engine to race back up to the stranded string of tank cars and shove them back to Cutoff where they could be tucked out of the way of the first of the morning traffic.

At Cutoff the engine could also be turned on the Y to run pilot-first as it worked the train down through traffic to the Goat Crossing Yard. They arrived nearly 10 hours late and it was two more days before the crippled engine was brought down to Goat Creek where it has been in bay 4 of the roundhouse since. Or rather, up until this morning.

Since it’s back on the active roster clearly the roundhouse crew have fixed 1428’s flue issue and have her road-worthy again, which on the one hand is good because it’s not like the DP has a surplus of spare engines on its roster, but on the other hand, Tom intends to do a more careful inspection than usual before signing for the engine this morning.

Otis Mann, thier conductor, walks into the crew lounge lugging his own, crisp and gleaming leather carryall, which makes Toms canvas version look even more shapeless and battered by comparison.

In addition to his thermos, Tom’s carryall holds pretty much the same as what’s in Otis’. Copies of the DP rulebook and timetable, the Alco RS-3 ring-bound operator’s manual, (Otis probably doesn’t carry this.) flashlight with spare bulbs rubber-banded to its barrel, extra batteries for the flashlight, (Otis uses one of the signal lanterns carried in the house-car instead of a flashlight.) goggles, heavy gauntlet gloves, a handful of glad-hand O-rings, a small bottle of aspirin, a big bottle of Tums, two PB&J sandwiches – heavy on the PB – just in case, clean shirt, socks, and underwear.

Like Tom, Otis is another SP transplant, only he moved over to the DP from the faraway Sacramento Division so the two of them never worked the same trains together until the DP.

Since the war the SP has been seeing an exodus of railroaders. Much of that has to do with the attitude of the new president who has been hiring Yale business grads, who know nothing about railroading, to fill all the supervisory positions while making it clear that he considers train crews a necessary evil to be used up and squashed-n-tossed like cigarette butts. But for both Otis and Tom a contentious management wasn’t their primary reason for leaving.

Whereas Tom’s motivation in coming back home to Daylight three and a half years ago was to escape the memories and get his life moving again, Otis came to Daylight right after the war to be close to his grandkids whose father was now doing something secret out here in the desert for the Army, or maybe it’s the Air Force.

Otis is plenty old enough to retire, but enjoys working the trains, though he does often take himself off the board on Fridays and Saturdays to spend more of the weekend at home with family. And arthritis is making filling out his reports a chore lately. His signature, once bold and flowing, is now labored and cramped to the point where it embarrasses him.

But he always shows up for work in his crisp and distinctive conductor’s uniform, complete with white-shirt, blue tie, and gleaming brass ‘Conductor’ badge on the front of his freshly brushed hat, as if he was assigned to a named passenger train slicing across the country on Class-1 rails rather than a slow freight on the largely unknown Daylight Pass short-line.

He brings an air of respectability to the job not always seen since most the other crewmen on the DP, including conductors, wear coveralls and flannel shirts under heavy denim jackets, and after a few hours out on the road don’t look much different from the ‘bos that might also be riding the train if the DP went somewhere, which it really doesn’t.

Fortunately for both Otis and Tom, the pool of railroaders in the Daylight area is shrinking.

Despite railroads being considered critical to the war effort, exempting its workers from military service, the war lured many of the younger men away anyways. This gave them a taste of other parts, and when it, the war, was over not many of them came back here. This left a preponderance of older men running the railroad, men that are, since the urgency of war has long faded, looking to take their retirements. And even for the Class-1 roads let alone a short-line like the Daylight Pass, the golden age of railroading is a thing of the past and attracting new talent isn’t easy.

Because of this the DP has allowed both Otis and Tom to carry half of their SP seniority over to the Daylight Pass (And for Tom, all of the 4 years he initially worked at the DP as a young kid before switching over to the SP) rather than making them start all over again. Though it did create some resentment from those that suddenly found these newcomers higher on the seniority list than them, this doesn’t give them enough seniority to successfully bid on the best job, the Ore Turn, but it is enough to allow them to hold down the freight job. This keeps them off the extra board where they would be picking up a variety of runs here and there. Of course this also lets them avoid the low-paying Pipeline.*

*As a through-unit train with no stops or switching, the Pipeline only takes about 4 hours to complete each of its six nights a week run. Add in an hour of ‘on-duty’ time at either end of the run and that means it only pays about 72 hours every half (two weeks.) and almost never any overtime. On top of that, like the freight, which at least pays better, the Pipeline crew has to lay over in Three Creeks three nights (days) a week. For this reason the Pipeline doesn’t attract many regular crews is often crewed off the extra boards.

Otis scrapes a chair up next to Tom and they compare their paperwork. Their orders are simple, their warrant (authority to be on the track) is the timetable which sets departure times and meeting points. Next they check for slow-orders, scheduled track-work, or any other changes from the norm. Today there is the long-standing speed-restriction when crossing trestle 39.6,* plus a slow-order because of a track-gang clearing brush between Mile Posts 48 and 54.

*Features such as bridges, trestles, culverts and the like are identified by their mile-post position. On the Daylight Pass MP 0 is at the depot in Daylight and MP 65.3 is the end of the mainline in Three Creeks.

Next is the switch-list showing them were to leave the various cars they will be dragging up the mountain today. And finally the way-bills, one for each car that shows where the car came from, where it’s going, and its weight. They have a 3 X 3 consist today, three loads and three empties, an unusually heavy train but not unheard of.

For loads they have a flatcar with machinery for the small sawmill in Big Timber, a tankcar for the Bailey Fuels depot in Downhill, and a 40’ boxcar of assorted goods for the Coop Warehouse in Three Creeks. The empties are an insulated boxcar for the packing house at Appleford, a gon for the quarry track at Rockhouse, and an ore-jenny to drop for the Jackson Brother’s mine at Cutoff. They have no pickups today, not a big surprise since most pickups up there on the mountain are made by the Downbound Freight

Including the engine and the house-car they have a train of about 365 tons, which in Class-1 railroading terms doesn’t sound like much,* but the DP is not a Class-1 railroad. It is a short-line with an average grade of just over 1.5% and a killer of a maximum grade, a knuckle whitening 3.1% around Wild Woman Loop on Mesa Hill.

*In railroad-ese the question ‘how many M's?’ is asking how heavy a train is. An M is 1000 tons. On the Class 1’s, especially those with flat territories where keeping the cars moving is easier, it’s not unusual for a train to weigh in at 10 or more M’s, 10,000 tons. Here on the DP the heaviest train will be about 1.2Ms and today’s freight is just barely a third of an M!

In the construction years, 1907 through 1911, the DP, a standard gauge railroad, was built to narrow gauge standards with light rail spiked down without tie-plates on untreated ties resting on dirt, as it was shoved quickly up the mountain. Since those days the line has been upgraded significantly. Now the entire mainline rests on a proper roadbed topped with treated ties and the rail is mostly ballasted and spiked down through proper tie-plates. But the curves are sharp, the grades steep, and the rail is still light, 60 – 65 pounds (per yard of length) compared to the 100 – 110 pound rail of the Class-1’s.

On top of that their motive power is a 50 year old steamer weighting in at a measly 70 tons.* Tom has seen a photo of 1428 in the railroad’s main office across the street from the Daylight depot taken when it first arrived on the DP sitting in front of the original ore-loader up in Three Creeks. Back then it had a wooden cab, old, pointy ‘cow-catcher’ style pilot, a kerosene headlamp, slide-valves, and a small, switcher-style tender. Since then, not only has the ore-loader been replaced, (The original used to sit where the Six Peaks Power Plant is now.) but on the engine a larger air-compressor has been added, along with a steel cab, electric headlight, (With generator of course) the original slide-valve cylinder assemblies have been replaced with more efficient piston-valve versions, and a proper road tender with larger water and oil tanks has been tagged on her. But none of that makes the engine any more powerful.

*Railroad engines, using slippery steel wheels on slippery steel rail, rely on weight for traction. The heavier the engine the more tractive effort it can lay down. In comparison the Union Pacific’s Big Boys used to hump freights up Sherman Hill weigh in at 594 tons.

Fortunately they will be dropping two of the cars, one empty and one load, before taking on Mesa Hill. With the train cut down to 230 tons they have a fighting chance at pulling the steep grades of the hill, especially up through the Wild Woman Canyon section.

Included in Otis’s paperwork is the order that the overnight yard-crew placed the cars when they built the consist and he confirms that all three empties are at the rear, which is where they belong because trying to pull a train around the DP’s sharp curves, especially the rail-kinking 20° curve (About a 285’ radius) of the steep Wild Woman Loop, with empties ahead of loads is a receipt for pulling lightweight empties, held to the track by a puny little 1” flange, sideways right off the rails as they are stretched between the pulling of the engine in front and the tugging of loaded cars behind. Besides, if they have to make a quick stop with an empty ahead of loads, the empty could end up being squeezed out of the consist like a popped pimple. Even with the cars in the proper order, load and empties wise, Tom still isn’t too keen on having that loaded tank car tagging along right there behind his tender. He’d rather they put the more beguine boxcar destined for Three Rivers in there instead, giving him a little more distance from the volatile fuel in the tank car, but then he’s just the driver.

Finished with the paperwork Tom and Otis compare their watches, both set this morning to the clock above the dispatcher’s desk, the clock that rules the railroad, to make sure they agree before going their separate ways. Otis to visually verify the consist sitting on yard-track 3 with the paperwork in his hand, then find his house-car and make sure it’s stocked up and ready to go. And Tom to the ready-track with Jake, his fireman, to inspect 1428.

Closing Out Some Chapters, But the Saga of Elmer Continues

Yep. I said the saga continues!

Just about one year ago the family circled the wagons to get Elmer, my 90 year old father-in-law, transported from his winter fishing-camp (Travel trailer parked in a campground on the Texas golf coast) back up to his daughter Dale's house in Missouri. It was quite the logistical operation but we all, even Elmer, survived, though at the time he was pretty convinced he was dying, (For real this time! Honest!) and frankly he looked it.

But that was hardly the first time he's slid down that chute greased with a lifetime of smoking, chicken-fried steaks, biscuits and gravy, and physical injuries brought on by general clumsiness. So none of us were too surprised when he recovered, once again. (Well - OK, maybe some of us were a bit surprised. I mean even his own doctor can't figure out how come the man is still alive! A good five years ago, prior to one of the road-trips to get him from Missouri to Texas for the winter fishing season, his daughter pulled Elmer's doctor aside and asked what they should do if Elmer croaked in the car on the way down. "Oh no!" he said, "You don't want to go through all the paperwork and hassles if he dies out of state, so just prop him up in the back seat with a blanket, head straight back here, and call me when you get close.")

But once again, from the very jam of death's door, Elmer rallied and we were, depending on which of us you ask, mildly to moderately surprised.

Though we certainly have been shocked by some of the changes that he's implemented, all on his own, in the months since!

• First off he actually willingly handed over his car-keys and traded his driver's license in for a state ID. Yep, no kicking and screaming. No having to hide the keys and imply he has just lost his mind, and with it them, somewhere. No removing the rotor in a midnight operation worthy of James Bond, then commiserating with him about the unreliability of old cars. After he got back to Missouri he never once tried to sneak out and drive anywhere, even though Bass Pro (Which is sort of, along with Academy, his personal version of church.) is only a few miles from where he's living now. He just decided he likes being chauffeured around instead. (Did you hear the collective sigh of relief from all of us? I'm pretty sure it registered on a few of the USGS seismographs.) 

• Elmer, who claims he started smoking when he was 5, has quit! At first he switched over to an e-cig but he had a habit of puffing so hard on the damn trying to make as much 'smoke' hang around his head as he could with a cigarette, that Dale was afraid it was going to explode and relegated him to e-puffing outside. (Dale's pretty particular about who blows up her house.) Well winter came along with its single-digit temps and blowing snow and that was the end of the e-cig too.

• Elmer grew up in the generation that went to school, unwillingly, through the 8th grade then headed out into the real world to get on with life. For him reading was, except maybe for the manual for his new fishing reel, an odiferous evil. The one good thing about going mostly blind was that no one expected him to perform this monkey-trick anymore. But suddenly he discovered the local library's audio-books program and has turned into an addict. Hovering around the mailbox waiting for them to send him the next set of word-smithed CD's. He actually starts Jonesing when he gets down to the last disk in the current book and the next Mary Higgins Clark hasn't shown up in the mailbox yet!  

But the latest curve-ball thrown by that old man (OK, perhaps feebly dribbled across the floor since his throwing arm - well - isn't anymore.) was him calling us the other day and asking if it would be alright to give the travel-trailer away, as is, where is!



I nearly fell over!

He loves that travel-trailer. In his entire life, which, you'll have to agree, is pretty damn long, that Keystone Hornet is the only place he's ever lived on his own. The only place that was all his, no sharezees, just his to clean, or trash, all by himself. So our plan, even though there was clearly no way he could ever move back into it again, was to just leave it there behind Ronny's barn until he was gone so Elmer could at least continue to dream of life in that trailer.

We weren't looking forward to the hassle of disposing of it later, but for now it brightened Elmer's day once in a while by just being there, or so we thought.

But surprised or not, before my sweaty palm-print had dried on the phone, I was in the safe, pulling out the title, signing it, (Fortunately, when we bought the trailer for Elmer back in 2007 we put it in our names, not his, figuring on a future situation just like this.) and stuffing it in an envelope to send to the new owner like right now! (Though The Wife did talk me out of making a special trip to town just for that.)

Yippee!  There's 27 feet of monkey off our backs!

 


In the mean-time Elmer continues to roll, stutter, glitch, and plod on even though we have been expecting "the phone call" for quite some time now.

Intro to Running the Upbound Freight on the Daylight Pass Railroad

And now for something completely new!

A few months ago, many months ago now, far more than I had anticipated, I had the urge to build something for my mostly imaginary model railroad and sat down at my modeling station with a catalog of kits. I could have sat down anywhere, but I chose there, in the midst of all my modeling tools and supplies, for the inspiration. Except no inspiration came.

After browsing through hundreds of kits with growing frustration (In the corporate world you quickly learn to present management with only 2, certainly no more than 3, options, otherwise they will never make a decision.) I came to the realization that though I have been toying with this railroad in my head for years, I still didn’t have a real plan for it. There was no solidification of purpose or intent, only a murky soup of vague ideas to work with, therefore I had no basis on which to select what particular kit I could build at this time that would further the project and not just waste time. After all, there’s only just so much time to waste in a lifetime and I think I’ve about used up all my allotted wastage. (Besides, I’ve already got a couple drawers full of random models with no particular home for them.)

If I was inclined to model a piece of a real railroad, say the Southern Pacific’s San Joaquin Division between Caliente and Bakersfield, it would be easy. I would just select kits of real buildings and places along that route, of which there are many available because that includes the famous Tehachapi Loop area that has been, and is currently being, modeled to death, creating quite a market for such kits.

But I don’t want to model something that already exists, I get enough of the ‘real world according to the other guy’ as it is. For me model railroading offers the opportunity to create a world the way I think it should be and not be confined to a place and circumstances that already exist, or existed, depending on the time frame I select.

So I put the catalog away and shifted gears that day. It was clear that, unless I wanted them to also just end up in a drawer somewhere with little hope of eventually finding an actual home on a model railroad, before I built up any more kits I needed to develop the world in which they would live.

Though some of the previous statements might sound that way, I’m not interested in pure fantasy either, and a good way to prevent that is to use a real place and time as a foundation to build off of. In my case that turned out to be a melding of two real-world railroads.

The narrow-gauge (3’) Whitepass and Yukon has long been a favorite, but once you take away tourism, the mono-reason for its existence, hauling ore from mines in the interior down to the seaport of Skagway, was always a bit of a stumbling block.

I wanted more diversity than that. 

Then, while I was stumbling over that particular block, I fell smack on top of the Alamogordo & Sacramento Mountain Railway.

Here was a standard gauge railroad (4’8”) built in narrow-gauge territory to narrow-gauge standards and run like a narrow-gauge railroad! As a bonus, standard-gauge models, you know, engines, track, freight cars, etc., are a lot more plentiful and much less expensive than narrow-gauge stuff.

But again, if you take away tourism, the A&SM was also a mono-commodity railroad, logging in this case.

But by stealing bits of each of those real railroads and melding them into one imaginary railroad, selecting a time-frame, and half appropriating, half imagineering, a place for it to exist in, I had a foundation on which to start building in my head a backstory for my railroad, my world. Except that I really needed to get it down on paper because I can’t hold all the details in my head without losing many of them. (I know this from hard experience!)

My paper-and-imagination creation needed to include a location and route, commodities to be found along that route, a history and backstories of the places as well as the railroad itself, a schedule of trains, and even some of the people that inhabit my world. And so I opened up the laptop and went to work.

The original idea was to build up enough of a picture to successfully model one particular place, a simple, remote depot, along that railroad, but – well – things kinda got out of hand.

By the time I had put together a multilayer route-map in SketchUp, built three spreadsheets, and written 15,000 words of backstory I was still struggling for cohesiveness in establishing some of the finer details. At this point I decided that I could best tie everything together in my mind by following a crew as they ran their train from one end of the railroad to the other, letting them fill in and fine-tune the details for me as they went. (This, the following of a train crew down the track, is used occasionally in model railroad magazines, of which I have far too many, to introduce a layout to the readers.)

The idea worked a charm, fleshing out many things I had been struggling with, but it too kind of turned into a monster.

By the time I got the crew of freight #420 from their point of origin to the end of their run, 60.3 miles away, it was months later (In real time, not railroad time.) and I had 50,000 words – complete with illustrations covering a 15 hour and 20 minute long day of pushing freight!

To make all this as accurate as reasonably possible,* something demanded by my DNA, took a lot of research, which is just one aspect of the amazingly diverse and complex world of model railroading.

*Accuracy within the confines of model railroading often succumbs to the many compromises necessary. For instance I have three distinct eco-zones, arid, temperate, and alpine, all squashed down to fit within a 4500 foot elevation change. Now there are places in the world where this exists, but they are few and far between. And having a short-line railroad hauling short trains over steep grades that is still operating, albeit on tight margins, beyond the half-way point of the 20^th century is a bit of a stretch.

Now I enjoyed the research, I enjoy history, and I enjoy being creative, so the time spent on this project was, as you have probably guessed, enjoyable, if somewhat obsessive. And it has served its purpose in giving me a solid basis on which to focus my ongoing modeling efforts. (As soon as I finish this post, and get The Van into the city for an oil change, and fix that sticking door, and - well you get the idea - I'll sit down with that catalog again and look for a kit I can kitbash into the Cutoff Depot.)

But now that it’s done, or as done as things like this ever are, in addition to going back to look for that kit to build, I am going to risk chasing off the last few readers I have left by dribbling the story of train #420, the Upbound Freight on the Daylight Pass Railroad on October 20, 1954, its machinery, its crew, and some of the people along the way that keep the railroad running, out onto my blog in bits and pieces, in the form of an old-fashioned serial if you will.

Just warning y’all.

One last thing:

The places and people, though some of each may seem familiar to a few out there, are purely my imagination, but I have attempted to make the technical details as accurate as possible, though any deficiencies in that area are also mine.

As A Christian ??

The other day I heard about a woman refusing to prepare taxes for a married couple who happened to be same-sex, even though, with full knowledge of their sexual orientation, she had no trouble doing their taxes in previous years when they were individually filing as single. She prefaced her defense of this refusal with "As a Christian. . ."

Shortly after that I read a comment to a post about treating people with respect that started with "As a Christian it is a challenge because people expect you to act a certain way"

I have to ask, What way is that?

• It is the way of Fred Phelp's Westboro Baptist Church followers when they were protesting the LGBQT community by disrupting random military funerals claiming it was God's punishment that the soldier died?
• Or is it the way of the all-volunteer secondhand store run by a consortium of 7 different local churches that continued to serve the economically challenged of their community by collecting and distributing goods free of charge in the wake of Hurricane Harvey despite loosing their store and inventory under 10 feet of water?
• Perhaps it's the way of the orthodox monks on Mount Athos (Northeastern Greece.) that ban females, even non-human females, from the peninsula they autonomously rule (Under favorable European Community Legislation) lest their girly cooties defile the place.
• Or maybe it's the way of Candice Payne who recently whipped out her credit card and bought 30 hotel rooms in Chicago on a night predicted to get down to -50, then transported about 100 homeless to the rooms in a flotilla of vehicles owned and piloted by volunteers responding to her Instagram request.
• Or possibly it's the way of Eric Rudolph, a self-professed Born Again Christian claimed by the Army of God to be "a Brave Christian doing God's work", when he randomly killed Alice Hawthorn by bombing Olympic Park. 

That's a pretty wide moral spectrum of acts performed by people all acting "as a Christian"!

I have to admit that anymore, as soon as I hear someone say "As a Christian" I have a very un-Christian, or, on second thought, perhaps it's a very Christian,* prejudicial reaction.

The point is "As a Christian" means absolutely nothing anymore because it means pretty much anything. People need to be more specific as to what brand of "As a Christian" they are referring to.




*I have to be careful here. Did you know that an 1811 appeals ruling in a blasphemy case against a Mr. Ruggles by New York State Chief Justice James Kent, who agreed with prosecutor Gold when he argued that the common law of England as it stood in 1776, which includes criminalizing blasphemy against the Christian religion, is part of American law? Based on that it's OK for me to say the most horrible and incendiary things I want about atheism, but if I do the same about Christianity I'm breaking the law. Don't believe me? Check out the current General Laws Of Massachusetts, Part IV. Crimes, Punishments And Proceedings in Criminal Cases , Title I. Crimes And Punishments, Chapter 272. Crimes Against Chastity, Morality, Decency And Good Order, Section 36. Blasphemy, which reads: 

Whoever wilfully blasphemes the holy name of God by denying, cursing or contumeliously reproaching God, his creation, government or final judging of the world, or by cursing or contumeliously reproaching Jesus Christ or the Holy Ghost, or by cursing or contumeliously reproaching or exposing to contempt and ridicule, the holy word of God contained in the holy scriptures shall be punished by imprisonment in jail for not more than one year or by a fine of not more than three hundred dollars, and may also be bound to good behavior

Dammit! The People In White Coats Got Me.

There are some poor, misguided souls that don't see it this way, but in general going to the doctor is not something most people enjoy. And of those there is a subset of people for whom going to the doctor is a downright horror.







Count me in that latter group. In fact, I'm pretty sure you can count me as being in the extreme upper end of that latter group.

There's no logic to it, this thing that is so prevalent it has an official name, the White Coat Syndrome, any more than there's logic to most phobias, but there it is. Just as real as that pair of too-small, full-footed, one-piece Superman pajamas (Spelled Supperman because they were a cheep, unlicensed knockoff.) Auntie Tia gave you for your 15th birthday.

In my case, as if having to stand on the scale in sight of God and everyone (Fully dressed and booted which adds 7 pounds. I know because I've checked.) isn't bad enough, when they, you know, those fiendishly grinning, deceptively friendly, overly solicitous, white-coat wearing minions, force me down into a seat next to that hulking sphygmomanometer, I know I'm going to throw an "Oh my God Call an Ambulance!" blood pressure reading, which, of course, bumps the damn reading even more by tacking on an additional 5 points at both ends.

(I had to walk out of a dentist's office once, shaking an assortment of hygienists, technicians, and receptionists off my arms and neck while dragging a prone, leg-hugging dentist along behind in a Boris Karloff shuffle, because they insisted I was going to go to the emergency room. I mean sheesh, You'd think professionals that are constantly facing a steady stream of freaked out victims clients, wouldn't freak out so bad!)


This time, in an attempt to make the whole event less traumatic The Wife tried to sneak it up on me, my only pre-notification being a Post-it with a name I didn't recognize (I mean who knows their doctor's first name?!) stuck to the mirror the night before.

But like that dog all proud and primed thinking he's on his way to meet his friends at the dog-park,







there comes a point where he recognizes the turn into the vet's parking lot and tries to crawl under the front seat, which, in these damned toys they call modern cars is nigh on impossible for an old fat man. (But I tried anyway. I'm just lucky I didn't get wedged in so bad she had to call the rescue squad to extract me.)

After a couple hours of being poked, left to sit, body shamed, left to sit, bled, lifestyle shamed, left to sit, prodded, displayed, and lectured at, I was released; whereupon I blindly dashed out to the parking lot and scrabbled desperately at the handle until The Wife finally unlocked the damn car.

I spent the rest of the day sequestered in The Van reading and napping and Sudokuing and trying to forget.              Oh the horror, the horror.

Many doctors I've been subjected to insist on treating the BP reading obtained off me in their office, which results in a copious amounts of an assortment of expensive drugs that would actually kill me if I took them. This particular doctor doesn't even read the BP written on the chart, instead he accepts my printed-out spreadsheet of daily readings and treats to that. Even so, I have to cut his prescriptions down by about half to avoid fainting every time I stand up any faster than a sloth or want to take more than a dozen steps all in a row without a rest period in between.

Yesterday I threw an inexplicably tolerable, for me anyway, 185/95 in the doctor's office. Today, in a post-apocalyptic, stress-releasing letdown, my mid-day BP reading was 90/45. I could tell even before I slapped the cuff around my wrist because my ass was dragging only halfway through a lap around the property and I had that weird, stuffy, fuzzy feeling in my head.

Hopefully it will be back up by 20 or 30 points in a day or two so I can get back to my life. -- For another year -- (As always he wants me to do a 6 month followup. Yeah right, like that's going to happen!)

Of Wood and Mice and Men (part 2)

When I left off at part 1 of this post I had just glued my Cedar slab to a substrate and had to walk away while it cured overnight, which was time standing around that I really didn't have since Mom's birthday was barreling down on me.




Released from the prison of the glue-up, but before I glued the leaves in place, since that will take another overnight chunk of curing time, it was time to trim the slab down to its final size.

I don't know if she will use it that way, but in my mind's eye this vase sits on the slab, which will be the base of a tray, which sits on her table.

With the vase in place for visualization purposes I messed around with getting just the right size figured out, as you can tell from the various pencil lines to the right and left.

I had already settled on the sides, at the top and bottom, being slightly curved.

I came up with just the curve I wanted by bending a springy piece of wood in my hands until I liked the curve, then, while holding that curve, getting The Wive to trace it onto a scrap which I then cut at the bandsaw so I could use it as a template.




With the trimmed size of the slab determined I set both the tablesaw (for the straight end-cuts) and bandsaw (for the curved side cuts) to the 5 degree angle I had designed for the sides and ends to slant outward.



With the slab trimmed to final size it was finally time to glue the three leaves into place and walk away until the next day.



OK, This is where the mice and men stuff comes in, you know, best laid plans and all that.

When I started dry-fitting the oak sides and ends to the tray-bottom it looked like - well, it looked like crap!

Even with the necessary clamps and straps in the way I could see that that 5 degree angle was just bad. Bad composition, bad form, bad flow, bad everything!

So, after wasting time agonizing over this monumental fail, here I am clamping a belt sander to the bench so I can very carefully sand the angle off the curved sides and make them vertical again.



And back at the table saw, carefully bracing and wedging the slab, since I no longer have a straight edge to reference off of, (I originally cut the ends while the sides were still square then curved the sides at the bandsaw.) as I change the 5 degree slant on the ends to 20 degrees.

By now, what with all the dry-fitting of the complicated angles, the growing realization that this was just plain ugly, the time wasted in processing this monstrous blunder, and finally repairing the mess, I'd burned up most of a day and, because I had procrastinated so much in getting started on this project in the first place, had to work well into our usual popcorn and TV time that evening to get the now vertical sides glued to the base so they could cure overnight.

It's hard to see in photos, which seem to straighten them out, but by looking at the angle of the jaws of the far clamp you can get an idea of the amount of curve I'm dealing with here.

To make up for the late night, the next day was a short one as I glued the ends of the tray into place.

I started by slicing a scrap but straight bit of 2X4 down the middle at a 20 degree angle. By flipping one of the resulting pieces over, these formed clamping blocks to translate my vertical clamp-jaws into the proper angle.

The bench-clamps in the middle are holding the assembly down so it doesn't squeeze up and escape as I apply clamping pressure from the ends.

The next day, after the ends had plenty of time to cure, I clamped a half-sheet of sandpaper to the bench, and using the other half as a spacer to keep the tray flat, I sanded the bottom edge of the angled ends flat and square with the bottom of the tray.

For some reason, probably because I was scrambling to wrap this project up in time, I didn't take any photos of applying the finish or the final glue-up where I covered the bottom of the tray with black felt and then carefully trimmed it to fit, 'polishing' the cut edges with a quick pass of a propane torch.

But I did finally hand it, and the vase, over to the USPS, then tracked it nervously through a vicious cold-snap that had even the post office bottled up next to the fire as my package sat, almost within sight of Mom's mailbox, for two days, but it finally made it there with a half-day to spare!

Right about now is when I should vow to never procrastinate again, but that can wait. . .

Of Wood and Mice and Men (part 1)

I knew way back in early - well, let's just say many months ago - that Mom was looking for a new centerpiece for the dining table in her downsized apartment. I also knew that its a rule that mothers are required to gush and grin and fawn over refrigerator artwork from the hands of their children. And, of course, since I'm the good son, (OK Mom, you can stop laughing now. . .) I also knew that she had a birthday coming up.

But that, knowing her birthday is coming up, didn't keep me from fiddling and farting around until suddenly The Day was sneaking up and coming at me like a freight train.

I'm not one of those that's necessarily better under pressure, nor am I the type that enjoys and thrives on pressure. No, I'm the guy that pays the month's bills just as soon as the final statement has been posted to get it done and out of the way. (OK, technically I schedule the payments then since they aren't actually paid until 2 days before coming due.) Yet somehow I found myself scrambling around frantically gathering supplies while under an ever tightening deadline.

But first I had to clean up the workbench which had suffered greatly under a plethora of small projects and over-spray. (You try painting the wire of Christmas tree lights with a spray-can because seeing green wire against a brown trunk bugs the crap out of The Wife! Oh, and next time she can tape off all 150 bulbs!)

After getting the workbench clean enough to actually work on, I split that chunk of Red Heart Cedar (All the wood was harvested from the property) at the band-saw and edge-glued it back together to create a larger slab.

With that having to cook overnight I spent a few minutes wandering the property looking for just the perfect (from left to right) Post Oak, Water Oak, and Live Oak leaves.

I traced each one onto paper which I then cut out and glued to one of the small slabs of oak.

Next it was time to set up the scroll-saw and cut the leaves out.

Prior to this, because I knew I was down to my last blade and scroll-saw blades don't usually last very long for me since I tend to break them, I bought a fresh pack of assorted blades. There were only a few in the pack that I could use, but that assortment was all I could find in a hurry. . .

Except. . . When I lifted the scroll-saw off the wall-peg where it is stored, three more packs of blades that I had completely forgotten about dropped to the floor! (If this sounds suspiciously like the recent battery incident, it is, and clearly I haven't yet learned that lesson.)

A quick detour here because, well, I've already nearly run myself out of time to get this done so what's the harm in wasting more of that time, right?

When I built my shop I included a cutout in the fixed workbench. I also cut a number of "plugs" that fit into that cutout and have mounted them to the bottom of some of my smaller, bench tools.

If you check back to the photo prior to this one you can just barely see one of these plugs attached to the bottom of the grinder now sitting to the right and how the plug on the bottom of the scroll-saw fits into the bench.

Now all I have to do is drop whatever tool I'm working with at the moment into the cutout in the bench and it is firmly stabilized. As an added bonus, I drill holes in the plug which makes it a snap to hang unused tools up out of the way.

 Once the leaves are cut out at the scroll-saw, and the glued up Cedar slab is cleaned up and planed down, I messed around with arraigning the leaves on the slab until I was reasonably happy, then carefully traced the outline of each leaf onto the Cedar with a fresh #11 blade. (Pencil lines, even from the finest mechanical pencil, are too thick and imprecise for this step. The old cabinet makers struck most of their lines with blades and finding these marks on the dove-tails of drawers and insides of cabinets is one way of authenticating a piece.)

Then I drilled a hole inside each leaf-tracing and headed back to the scroll-saw where I snaked the blade up through each hole in turn so I could cut the shape away.

My particular saw used to have a little puffer thingy on it that would use the up and down motion of the arm to blow sawdust away from the blade so I could see what the heck I was doing. It worked fine but unfortunately didn't work long, or at least not long enough. A long time ago now the little bellows that made the thingy work split wide open and it quit puffing.

Now I use a nightmarish concoction of air-hose and various clamps to blow a gentle but cold (This was January in my unheated shop) stream of air at the juncture of wood and blade.

I'm using a spiral blade here, which is great because it cuts in any direction which means I don't have to keep spinning and turning that largish slab so a traditional blade can follow the line, but the spiral blade does take some getting used to and before I did any real cuts I used up some time I didn't really have in making some practice cuts on a scrap to get my 'feel' back.

Back on the real cuts, the trick is to cut just inside the line. No pressure here, but if you wander over to the other side of the line the piece is ruined. Like I said, no pressure but - well - tick tock.

The next step is to use a variety of carving knives and files to fine-tune the holes in the slab to perfectly fit the leaves so they will drop right in.

Thought the finished product might look like it, technically this is process I'm using is not inlay. If that were the case a leaf-shaped depression would be carved into a thick slab, instead this technique here is officially marquetry, but who really cares?  After all, you can call me anything you want and it doesn't really make a difference. (OK, I know what you're thinking, and I'll concede that if you call me something nasty, and it's true, it might sting a little.)

With the leaf-holes all cleaned up and ready it was time to glue the slab onto a substrate. In this case a scrap of luan (Just barely poking in over on the left.) left over from when I built The Van's latest cabinet doors.

Wanting to make sure I got a good, solid glue-up I clamped the sandwich between some scraps of MDF.

MDF, while send-me-to-the-chiropractor heavy, and choke-my-lungs dusty when cut or sanded, is relatively soft which means it not only won't mar the material under it but it will also conform to minor defects and variations which makes it perfect when clamping glue-ups.

I also threw in a caul to put some pressure there in the middle where the clamps around the edges don't reach. A caul is a heavy piece of wood with a slightly convex face that puts pressure out in the middle of the field when clamped at both ends.

Ten might seem like an awful lot of clamps for this small glue-up,but none of them are gorilla'ed down since squeezing out the glue kind of defeats the purpose. I just used lots of them to ensure a fairly even clamping pressure across the entire surface and cranked each one down to a light-medium.

OK, this is getting a little long so part 2 will follow in another post.

What's that?

Oh - you get the wood reference in the title but what about the mice and men?

Well that's coming up.