I like to try to do at the least something every day for the hobby that I convinced my wife would be better than me sitting at the bar all afternoon. So here is today’s fun but cheap project. I had a desk heater that quit and I thought what can I do with the left over parts for a flat car load. Well here it is sitting on a $7.00 Menards flat car. Giant generator parts going out for delivery to the power station.I used cheap costume jewelry chain for the tie down. Can be found for very little at stores and Goodwill.
Joined 1-21-2011 TCA 13-68614
Kev, From The North Bluff Above Marseilles IL.
KEV,
Cool!
Regards, Roy
I bet all of us have a bunch of junk that would look good on a flat or gondola. Good idea.
Celebrating 18 years on the CTT Forum.
Buckeye Riveter......... OTTS Charter Member, a Roseyville Raider and a member of the CTT Forum since 2004..
Jelloway Creek, OH - ELV 1,100 - Home of the Baltimore, Ohio & Wabash RR
TCA 09-64284
Looks great KRM!
Hey Buckeye, that gives me an idea! Why not have a sort of impromptu/unofficial "contest" (sans prizes, rules or judging ) to see what everyone can come up with to load on a flatcar made from stuff lying around the house. Who's game?
Becky
Trains, trains, wonderful trains. The more you get, the more you toot!
Penny Trains Looks great KRM! Hey Buckeye, that gives me an idea! Why not have a sort of impromptu/unofficial "contest" (sans prizes, rules or judging ) to see what everyone can come up with to load on a flatcar made from stuff lying around the house. Who's game? Becky
Becky, I am in,, hey wait I already started! I use all kinds of stuff that is just around. In this case I thought a generator/motor can be any size so why not.
Go for it, will be nice to see what people come up with.
I'll do a couple do we want to do a new thread or put them in SPF or I guess we could use this thread Duh
Life's hard, even harder if your stupid John Wayne
http://rtssite.shutterfly.com/
rtraincollector I'll do a couple do we want to do a new thread or put them in SPF or I guess we could use this thread Duh
This should work RT,
Here are some more homemade loads on our layout.
Sticks from the yard.
Used train parts and more sticks from the yard on the cars in the back.
PVC pipe.
Broken toys.
Stir sticks.
More broken toys
Die-cast toys. 1:50th scale is what I like to use. A bit small but good for me.
And one for the grandkids
Here's a Marx flatcar hauling some Altoids mints to a warehouse:
Last month at our modular club layout, love was in the air, er, cars:
J White
I'm in.
..........Wayne..........
This load was assembled from bits and pieces of old model tank and aircraft kits.
ERTL 1:64 scale farm toys.
I have figured out what is wrong with my brain! On the left side nothing works right, and on the right side there is nothing left!
This one seemed like a no-brainer, a narrow gauge Porter on a fishbelly.
A 1:48 scale paper model F1 Saturn V first stage engine.
I did this one years ago. I had the Minicraft loco kit and was looking for a display site. So I settled on using a 117 caboose frame to create this traveling display car.
And....
Last but not least...
Here's an idea of what to do with an old golf ball. Just make a little "gadget".
YIKES Penny! The last time I saw a picture of a "gadget" like that it was setting at the top of a tower in Alamagordo, New Mexico. A few days later it was gone, along with the tower and about 5 miles of surrounding scenery. Come to think of it, it may have even been code-named "gadget".
You can see an (unused) example of a real "gadget" at the Nimitz museum in Fredericksburg, TX:
Bob Nelson
Nice everyone, I have been having fun looking at all of these ideas.
I'm not sure if "gadget" was an official name or just the knickname Oppie and co. gave the 10KT Trinity device, but I figured it was a sufficiently fiendish load! Like most of the "research" devices that followed, the gadget bore little resemblance to any deliverable weapon (the 5MT Ivy-Mike device was an enourmous 3 story structure).
Anyhoo. This particular golfball guarantees a hole-in-one every time!
Not to get too far off on a tangent, but do you think Lionel or Flyer would have made a load like this back in the late 40's/early 50's if they could have? I wonder most about Flyer because of the Gilbert puzzles. But there's also the Lionel radioactive waste containers and AEC rolling stock to go along with the never produced (at the time) nuclear reactor.
I think there was still a great deal of postwar guilt and fear attached to nuclear devices in the late 40's/early 50's. Combine that with JL Cowen's refusal to make war toys, and the likelihood for production at that point was probably near zero. Even if they were produced were people ready to purchase them for their kids? Those attitudes softened as the 50's progressed and the space race heated up. There was still fear (a la the cold war) but also curiosity about the effects and uses of nuclear power (like turning sea life into Godzilla). At that point space was cool, and we were all playing "war" with little green toy soldiers. Along with Cowen's fading into the sunset, management finally had the opportunity to get into the military and space items we all search for today. Maybe we're ready now for someone to produce a nuclear research facility complete with "gadgets" and a whole family of destructive parphernalia. It seems plain old rockets are so passe now...we could use a few continent obliterators to spice things up a bit.... :)
It's the 45 to 49 timeframe that I wonder about. 1949 was when the Soviets tested their first device and after that point the bomb lost it's charisma seeing as now Americans didn't have a monopoly and could be hit with them just like everybody else. But prior to that event "atomic" seems to have been the word of the day. I don't have personal experience, I didn't come along till 69. But I do know the famous 2 piece swim suit was named after the "sexiest place on Earth" (according to one historian) Bikini atol, which was where the US was conducting highly publicized tests. This was also the timeframe when the Gilbert "Atom Bomb" puzzle toys came out. If you're not familiar with them, they were the "get the BB into the hole" type of games. Needless to say they "didn't stay on the market very long" to quote Bruce Manson (Great Toy Train Layouts Vol 3). They're rather ominous looking toys too.
So, I'm just curious. I wonder if one of the big three, Lionel, A.C. Gilbert A.F. or Marx, would have made an A-bomb toy in 1945 if they knew what one looked like.
P.S. I'm not bomb-happy, I just prefer to learn about the things that scare the bejezes out of me rather than go on being scared of what I don't understand.
"...the gadget bore little resemblance to any deliverable weapon..." I would say that it was eminently deliverable, to Nagasaki. From Wikipedia:
The term"Gadget" was a laboratory euphemism for a bomb, from which the Los Alamos Laboratory's weapon physics division, G (for Gadget) Division, took its name in August 1944. At that time it did not refer specifically to the Trinity Test device as it had yet to be developed, but once it was, it became the laboratory code name. The Trinity Gadget was officially a Y-1561 device, as was the Fat Man used a few weeks later in the bombing of Nagasaki. The two were very similar, with only minor differences, the most obvious being the absence of fuzing and the external ballistic casing...."
My recollection from the time, as a 10-year old living in Japan in 1952, was that the H-bomb was a desirable improvement over the A-bomb; and there was speculation about which letter of the alphabet would be used for the next advance in bombs. The prospect of nuclear power was seen as the answer to an environmentalist's prayers, providing cheap energy without pollution. Just like the telegraph, telephone, and radio earlier, any product with the word "atomic" or "nuclear" in its name was considered very sexy:
("Audio Engineer" by "Electro-Nuclear")
Yes, there was the "atoms for peace" movement - complete with U.S. issued postage stamps...and who can forget (assuming you were around and old enough to read the entertainment section of the Sacramento Bee) the seedy strip club with its small advert down at the bottom of the movies page describing their latest attraction as the "anatomic bomb".
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