What is your most expensive model railroading blunder/mistake/accident?

[Sunset Limited]

About eight years ago I bought 2 LIfe Like Proto 2000 E-9's in SP Daylight Scheme. I just received them and went straight to my work bench and test track. After putting them together I tried one out and ran great!! Then I tested the second one, It ran great also!! Then the phone rang, and I turned down the throttle and went to answer the phone, Next thing I heard was CRASH! I forgot about the flywheels in these things!!! I was upset ! To put it lightly! I got lucky though, a week later I called the Hobby Shop to see if they still had that E-9 in that road number and Daylight scheme, And they did! This time I bought an answering machine! Leave a message!!

[Anonymous]

The worst disaster I know of happened to a friend of mine. He is a Master MR with a beautiful layout. He has built tons of super detailed structures (FSM Quality) on his layout. Most of these structures had small PFM bulb detail lights, on the buildings, inside them, in light shades on the outside of stuff. While hooking them up to his power supply he somehow fried them all, we're talking many bulbs here. You can still see his face fall when he talks about this incident....There is no way to fix it unless he wants to pull up all the structures and take them apart to get to the bulbs...If there is a lesson here it may be not to cheap out on lighting power supplies and double check those voltages..

Guy

[Anonymous]

My worst disaster happened only a couple months ago, I dropped an Athearn SD-40-2 to the Concrete Central, didn"t hurt the shell , but it shure messed up the mechanism, Oh well, have to be more careful.


Mac

[rambo1]

My new atlas electric hit an open switch and derailed down to the cement floor OUCH! I took it back to the store where they gladly exchanged it for another. rambo1.........

[dragenrider]

I accidentally left my power pack on with the throttle cracked. My wife smelled something burning the next day but couldn't find the source. Later that week I found my favorite switch engine sitting in a melted puddle of plastic goo. And I had just regeared it, too! Wah!!!! [D)]

[passengerfan]

I repainted an old lionel train set that was still in the box with a pink engine I repainted it black and chose more railroad like colors for the freight cars I dont have any idea how much it cost me and I don't want to find out.

[trainfan1221]

i used to get mad that my haphazard layout on an old and falling apart ping pong table
always had problems with derailments or the drop of death. I mean, I couldn't figure out why, after all I had several books steadying the legs. The nerve of it to disobey me! The end result was occasional fits of anger and taking it out on equipment. I'm sure I
damaged quite a few things.

[Hawks05]

well today i was trying to put together a ore car kit. i was trying to put the couplers on. well they, being roundhouse, gave me the wrong size screws. they are to long for the hole so the coupler cover wouldn't stay down. it was screwed in but it wasn't tight, so i was trying to file the screws down to fit and one popped out of the pliers and went somewhere in the train room. it just shot around off the ceiling and somewhere. the room is also storage for other stuff with the trains in the center. so now i'm screwed there. and i'm also still trying to decide what to do about the coupler cover for one of my hoppers. not a good week at all.

little update, like anyone cares. i brought the stuff over to my friends house who has been modeling for over 25 years and he's keeping the 2 kits until he gets his work bench up. he just moved into a new house and hasn't started on the train room yet. his new room is HUGE. i can't remember the dimensions, but its bigger than the whole upstairs of our house here. he's trying to get his work table up then he'll work on my stuff. he's going to put my ore car kits together while painting the bottoms of them because the metal doesn't look right, and he's going to fix the coupler pocket on my CNW hopper. should be interesting to see how he does that. also i can't wait to help him when he finally decides to start building. i know its going to be a huge layout, 2 levels to. the only thing he knows for sure is where Union Station is going to be.

[coal drag]

QUOTE: Originally posted by brothaslide

QUOTE: Originally posted by coal drag

I never should've started buying coal cars. Over 2000 of them . . ..[#wstupid]

Over 2000!?!?!?!? That's cool!!!! Can you post some pics of your layout?

LAYOUT ??????

I don't have no stinking layout !!!

Didn't you notice the STUPID sign ???? [#wstupid]

btw - I run them on my club's modular layout.

[Anonymous]

Lets see, I've done the "glue yourself together with CA" thing. [:0]Thank goodness Sweetie had nail polish remover. [:X]
The cats have derailed a few cars, smashed a few trees, minor stuff.[:I]
I had a Bachman Dash 8 take a nosedive to the floor, only broke the front truck, I ordered parts and recieved front and rear trucks and store the extra parts after repairing the unit. Years later, a friend gave me a box of stuff, and in it was a Dash 8 with a truck broken off, the rear one! So all together, that cloud had a silver lining too![:p]
I guess the worst, and funniest moment came with the latout I had when I was a kid. Typical 4x8 loop, and I had ringed the layout with utility poles. To these I had run complete sets of "wires" out of a synthetic black thread, and had secured the wires with Superglue. My sisters cat had somehow gotten into the room, and dozed off in the middle of the layout. Being startled by me entering the room, he bolted, right into the utility wires, which yanked every pole on the layout out of its hole and ensnared him inside a ball of thread as he fell to the floor. Talk about a mad cat! He was a moving mass of claws, teeth, furr, thread and plastic poles moving across the floor like a missle. Yeah, I was mad, but I was too busy laughing at him as my sister untangled him. [(-D][(-D][(-D][(-D][(-D][(-D][(-D]
Funny thing, he never went into that room again! [:D][:D][:D]

[csxns]

Getting mad and smashing a Atlas locomotive against the concrete floor and throwing and stomping a Athearn Sandersville boxcar because i got glue on it.

[BRAKIE]

My biggest blunder to date was dropping a PFM AT&SF 2-8-0.. The damage was done to the front end and it was repairable.

[Anonymous]

I am a continuing source of expensive mistakes. But the best/worst/most expensive was some years back when I got a deal I just could not refuse. 2,000 ft of code 100 track. I bit hard, spent the cash and went and picked up my treasure. Old Atlas code 100 brass rail on fibre ties. I seem to jump first, then note the cliff I jumped from is very high.

Tom

[Paul3]

Expensive? Hmm...

I bought a Bachmann Spectrum H16-44 that had the nickel silver coating on the wheels flake off. And I had a couple of Bachmann Plus F-units start to squeel after only a few hours of operation. Little things like that.

However, that's just me. I have seen and or heard a of a lot of expensive mistakes by my fellow club members:

Let's see, there was the time one guy was pouring molten lead into his steam engine to weigh it down. The trick is you do this to an unpainted brass boiler in a bed of ice, and put cofferdams at each end to avoid spillage. Well, the guy had a cofferdam let go, and molten lead poured out of the smokebox front. After a lot of cutting and Dremel grinding, he was able to fix it.

Then there was the one where a guy was "baking" on the paint on a brass model. He used his toaster oven, but for some reason, the thermostat broke in the oven, causing too much heat. It melted all the solder, and turned his freshly painted brass steam engine into a kit. Fortunately, he had a friend who builds steam engines from scratch, and he fixed it.

Or how about the guy who bought a new, double track Overland brass drawbridge who then dropped it down the stairs? A few bits of soldering and it was fixed.

Or the guy who put a new P1K RDC on a piece of foam rubber on his table, then walked away to get a box. The RDC rolled off the foam and smashed onto the floor, shattering the shell. The shell was a basketcase, but the frame will become a "Roger Williams" power car.

Then there was the guy who decided to clean his paint booth fan by scraping the hub clean with a screwdriver while it was running. Of course, it snagged the screwdriver and ripped off a couple of fan blades. Result: new paint booth.

Or how about the guy who just finished painting and decaling a new Overland brass steam engine and test ran it on his layout. Unfortunately, it derailed and rolled over in the only place where there wasn't any scenery, and landed head first on the concrete. It smashed the smokebox so badly that he had to return it to Overland, who either fixed it or replaced it (I'm not sure which).

Then there was this guy who put a lighting kit into an Athearn streamlined observation car. This required a ballast bulb. Well, the ballast bulb got so hot that it melted the car quite badly.

Or how about the guy who put Jay-Bee resister wheelsets in his expensive IHC "Super Free Rolling" metal trucks? Naturally, they all shorted out. End result: all new cars with all new trucks.

And now for the kicker: all of the above happened to the same guy! Now, that is a run of bad luck. Gee, I wonder if he'll read this? [X-)] [:D]

Paul A. Cutler III
*****************
Weather Or No Go New Haven
*****************

[Anonymous]

That's easy -- moving the family to Waukesha to work at Kalmbach! Don't get me wrong -- I enjoyed working at MR! Getting to work with Andy Sperandeo, Jim Hediger , David Popp and the rest of the staff -- it was great!

I had just completed benchwork and track on a new room-sized SP&S layout in February 2001 when Andy offered me the job. So I tore it down over a weekend. The following weekend we went to Milwaukee to look for a place to live, and my wife declared there that she just couldn't do live in Wisconsin. After a couple months of feeling sorry for myself, I started another SP&S layout. The following week, Andy calls to offer me the job again, we accepted, and moved to Wisconsin. I started a third SP&S layout in our apartment and had submitted plans for an HO scale switching layout to MR when in April, six months into our residence in the Badger State, it's apparent my wife is bitterly unhappy in Wisconsin, so in May we prepared to move back to Washington in late summer 2002.

Three layouts, two major moves, an unhappy wife -- the hobby got really expensive for a while.

[Anonymous]

I read an article in MR some years ago about using a candle flame to create engine exhaust soot. I was smart and tried it first on an old Lifelike GP40. I was really careful and it worked beautifully. So I then tried the same thing on my new Athearn AC4400CW. The flame got too close and I melted an exhaust stack. Anyone interested in an unused, semi-ruined AC4400 shell?

[GDRMCo]

My most painful experience was when my dad and I were building a small 4x4 sq. meter layout with a peninsula, We had all the track laid and were taking a train of a brass Alco PA custom painted by my mum in the GDRMCo ore black paint scheme and 5 brass boxcars all painted in the same scheme when we got to the peninsula and dad noticed that the peninsula backdrop had not been mounted properly (the base had a tounge witch was inserted in a slot and had no bracing) decided that it would fall over on the test train. The backdrop was a fairly thick and heavy sheet of wood so no matter how strong the models were they all got flattened. All those expensive models, detail parts and track all had to be binned. That event will haunt me forever.

[Anonymous]

About 7 years ago, I had most of my HO collection-25+ engines, 300+ cars, track, power packs, structures, etc.--stored in a storage unit that was broken into.

Out of all the stuff in that unit- a Kawasaki cycle, an S-10 pickup, 2 TV's, stereo, microwave, all kinds of house hold stuff, guess what the theives stole----yep, all boxes of the train stuff.[xx(][:(!] Didn't touch anything else....

Only have 1 engine, a few cars, and my modeling tools left from those days...[V]

[sparkingbolt]

My expensive mistake was collective: Buying Rivarossi steamers in the first place, in the late '70s. Tried to regear them, They ran like slot cars before, and wobbled after. Couldn't win.

Recently, I bought a "like new" but sold "as is" Spectrum 2-8-0 on eBay. When I got it, I found it had been rough handled, abused and misused. One set of drivers was WAY out of quarter, and a number of other things wrong. 9 to be exact. Contacted the seller, (not a modeller) we struck a deal, he made good, I kept the loco, got it running good, for half my original price. That could easily have gotten ugly, though. Dan

[brothaslide]

QUOTE: Originally posted by coal drag

I never should've started buying coal cars. Over 2000 of them . . ..[#wstupid]

Over 2000!?!?!?!? That's cool!!!! Can you post some pics of your layout?

[egmurphy]

Being asleep at the switch (and working outside the country) about 25 years ago when my mother sold the house a few years after my father died and significantly downsized to move into a small apartment. My Lionel trains from back in early childhood went bye-bye (plus my stamp collection, coin collection, and goodness knows what else that I had left at home when I went off to college and later kept moving around the country working).

Ed

[Anonymous]

I was in o scale when a dealer convinced me I had to have a zw transformer. Since I had the new MTH tracks and switches, Mth uses a circuit board underneath the switch mechanism to connect the rails across the switches. The zw blew out all circuit boards costing about $750.

[coal drag]

I never should've started buying coal cars. Over 2000 of them and I still need to complete several train sets. Once you get coal fever, it's with you for life.[#wstupid]

[METRO]

I had an entire commuter rake take a plunge:

When I was first building my mountain sections, I built up some nice floor-to-celing styrofoam mountains (still to be finnished) and laid the track...

I was testing the track by running a train over at increasing speeds. I must have missed a kink in the ballast, and pow, off goes the whole 10 car commuter train, sliding down the side of the mountain making a nice big dent in it before hitting the floor. I saved the locomotive (it needed a new cab) and most of the coaches but it was running with the coach cab car forward and that was a total loss.

[Anonymous]

My most expensive blunder...

Buying three Red Caboose wood reefers, and trying to put the first one together with ACC glue (not a pretty sight), and messing up the other two also. Since then I have learned to make sure you can actually build something and have the tools to do it before starting any projects...

[johncolley]

Building a great layout in too small a room, 2 levels with a 4-tier helix. My 1940's freights look OK on the 24"radius, but my Empire Builder 85 footers look like toys. So tear it out and re-do a bit less layout with bigger curves and a gentler helix. Is that what they mean by "The Learning Curve?" Remember, getting there is half the fun!

[Anonymous]

orsonroy

Yes, you're right in that I guess I've had bad luck with steam as others own some of the same engines I do and they just love 'em. I have a Bowser A5s that I converted to Sagami power which was great until the axle gear split. I replaced it twice and even rebuilt it to the new Bowser can motor. But it's gone...it just isn't the same. I hope the P2k 0-6-0 comes back some day and runs well. My Bachmann 2-8-0 runs way too fast and hitches along as though ill. It really bugs me because the only thing that got me into RRing was steam, to begin with. Believe me, I love steam. If they worked well for me, I'd have fewer diesels on my route.
smyers

[Don Gibson]

Buying an $800 Samhongsa made N&W Y5 and finding the Santa Fe used only Y3's

[BNSFNUT]

Droped a Atlas GP on a concret floor , total loss ,damanged trucks, frame and shell.
The fingers are getting stiff with age guess I will have to start using two hands to handle locomotives and cars.