It's Uno de Mayo and time to start ramping up those summer projects! Personally, this time of year makes me think about Christmas! And around MY house Christmas means train layouts and lots of em'!
So here we go!
You ready for round 3?
Are you ready to see what's new, exciting and in the works for my pocket Disneyland?
Well then...
Strike up the band!
Let's have a parade!!!!
Who's that cheeky fellow in the lead? It's James from the Isle of Sodor with Peter Pan and Wendy whipping up the crowd from his running boards!
Mickey and Minnie are on the first float in this small parade that salutes some of my favorite Disney characters, films and theme park attractions.
Including It's a Small World.
We also have Chip and Dale bearing down in a trolley on an unsuspecting Donald Duck as he tries to deliver mail to Daisy and Pluto. Cinderella shows off her carriage while sharing a float with Belle. Nemo races a seahorse around the coral reef that he calls home and Snow White and Aurora pick flowers near a fairytale carousel.
Now for the technical info.
James is a Tomy product as are the blue tracks he runs on. Mickey's "Big Drum" is from the Polly Pocket Disney castle playset which I modified to operate on Tomy rails. (It's also carrying quite a bit of ballast to keep from toppling on those tight curves!) The other 5 float vehicles are built on frames stolen from some cheap bullet train toys I had. (The car bodies crumbled like a bad Dorfan alloy! ) I added a strip of balsa to each "bogie" to create an elevated platform and then built the respective floats on corrugated cardboard clear of the wheels. Three of them have a shape that represents the subject of the float. Small World is the "happiest cruise that ever sailed" so that float is boat shaped. Similarly, Cinderella's float is an hourglass and Nemo's float is supposed to represent bubbles. The other two are just "anything but square".
The wheel base on these cars is approximately 2 1/2 inches so as you can probably imagine proper weight distribution was absolutely critical. But I'm not a trained engineer and the only mathematical equation I know is how to calculate the length of the angled side on a right triangle. (Thank you Mr. Pythagorus! ) So I wing it and add weights and shift things around until it stops falling over on the curve! Between the cars are very thin strips of flexible clear plastic cut from vacu-form packaging and they act as couplers for the floats. The heaviest cars are up front and even some of them required extra ballasting in the form of old sinkers glued to their undersides in order to pull the cars behind them. So that's how I decided on the order of appearance for the parade.
The Tomy track has a turn radius of approximately 16 inches so it makes it ideal for a layout with such limited space as Disneyland has. Originally I wanted to use N or HO for this project but in the end I decided simplicity was best on a layout with very limited accessibility. That meant derailments would be ridiculously hard to correct. So a train running in a "trough" beat out flanged wheels on rails. I started using Tomy wye tracks but their operation is unpredictable so I've gone back to a simple dogbone configuration. A side benefit of that is that I can run through a different area on the return trip. I'm hoping to further enhance the parade train's rerail ability by embedding the track in "streets" with flanged edges to help push stray vehicles back on the rails.
I have several boxes of these Tomy trains sitting in the basement and I figured it's time they started doing something around here! I chose James rather than Thomas because he runs on a C battery and Thomas only uses a AA. Several other Thomas series engines in my Tomy collection also use C cells, but James was faster than any of them. And for this job speed was equivalent to power, so James got the job. Besides, he's cute! Even if he isn't technically a Disney product per se!
So what's next? You'll find out shortly after I do! But I can tell you I plan to get that monorail finished come h......well, you know!
Becky