This Float's For You!, Pt. 1

      

      I know, I can hardly believe it myself! On the heels of last Saturday's blog post, here's another one, this time in response to a blog comment by Riley Triggs (http://ponyrr.blogspot.com/), asking about how I plan to handle my carfloats, and their operations. Well, if you've learned anything by reading this blog, you know that's like saying "here ya go Ralph, here's the keys to you very own railroad tug!"....Riley knew just the right questions to ask me to make me run off at the mouth, and I'm all too happy to answer them in detail.....I hope that all of you out there in cyberspace reading this also come away with some new ideas and/or fresh thoughts and comments, too. I'm also going to try something new too, and that's to break up my rather long-winded blog posts. I realized how I DO LOVE to go on (and on, and on...), so maybe this'll make things easier to digest (and keep y'all coming back!)

     

      So Riley asked me, and I quote "I'd be interested in further explanation on how you are dealing with your car floats. How are you locking them into the float bridge, and how is your cart configured? Are you physically moving all of them or just the two on the cart (in other words, are you lifting and walking any carts to another area or are they statically re-staged?)"

      I'm gonna start by answering the last question first (because it leads to how I lock them in). My original "dream" was to allow the two carfloats on the cart to be "docked/undocked" each time from the layout, as seen here in the following photos, but this was before I was "convinced" by my Chief Operating Officer that this wasn't such a good idea, at least for now and until we get the wooden Howe Truss floatbridges installed.

They can still be moved, just with a lot of finagling that makes it anoying to do. As you can clearly see, I (sort of) clearly have the room to move the cart, unlike my friend Dave Ramos does with his two carfloats (http://www.nyhrr.com). Dave initially installed a "sliding rack" on the Erie side of his layout seen here -

      ...In order to hold the outward end of his carfloat as it "dangled" into the isle. The idea being that the carfloat could be picked up and moved in between "floatings" to clear the isleway. This soon proved problematic as it was inconvenient to move it every time you wanted to load or unload a float, and also maintain a trouble-free "floatbridge to carfloat" interface for reliable, smooth operations. Better yet, it soon became known as the "rotary car dumper" when certain people failed to navigate the corner of the room (which is immediately out of sight to the left) and thus taking out more than one car kit in the process! High winds, maybe? Anyway, Dave has since enclosed the float and the benchwork to combat that issue, and also provide a place for the Active Staging Agent to work and store cars (the stool in the photo is about where the Agent sits, and he faces the camera...Sorry, no photo!). But I digress.......

      The cart itself is a cast off library book cart from work. I dunno, I seem to have a eye for these things that other people call junk! Since the shelves are sloped inward, it makes for a great place to store things, like cars that want to run away on a metal shelf! Eventually, I plan to line at least two of them with that "tacky" shelf liner stuff to place the cars coming off (or on) the float. That, and it'll keep me from storing junk on them all the time........

        I can hear Riley now saying "OK, enough already, do you plan on moving this thing!". The short answer is no, the long answer, yes. Like I said, a trouble free float-to-land interface is key right now while we are in the Shakedown phase of operations. Also, in order to mount the fantastic laser cut Howe Truss bridges seen here......
 

      ....Requires some custom track work (mostly on the bridges themselves) and additional benchwork and redesign (it's all just foam there right now). Honestly, other than the added  "play value" I hoped to get out of moving the carfloats in and out (the other two 3-track Walthers floats have no where to go, thanks to the main water pipe to the house being in the way, so they will stay put), the thought was that getting access to the two back ones would prove difficult if I DIDN'T make them removable. That actually has since proven more or less incorrect, as you can see here, sort of -

There's that damn water pipe and meter!

 

      I built two simple steps that give a 6 inch boost, and that seems to cure any reach issues, especially when it comes to throwing the turnout on the two back float bridges. As a side note, in the above photo, you can see how I raised the "floats" up to the level of the rest of the layout. Oh, and the carfloats themselves? Quick and dirty (but to relative scale) and cut out off some Gatorboard I had around. I simply used the tops of my other Walthers carfloat kits to trace the shape and plot the track centers, and then just scaled them to fit 5 cars on each track. They are more "waterline models" than the Walthers kits are! And yes, I was too damn impatient to paint them before I installed them, not to mention a little slightly misshapen! I intend to use these two pseudo-floats until I install the float bridges and then purchase a pair of Frenchman River floats (below), or maybe even (gasp!) scratchbuild a pair.

 

      Now, I always wanted a clear delineation between the "interchange" floats coming.going from the likes of the New Haven, Long Island, ect, and the "pier" floats moving across the river, hence the two kinds of carfloats, and their respective "docking points". The pier traffic of the LV was more frequent, but not as heavy in volume as the cars moved via interchange. The use of 2 track floats for pier traffic and 3 trackers for interchange was not truly a hard and fast rule as seen in the photos below, but it does provide an easy visual way to do so in our model world. That, and the LV surely docked whatever carfloat needed docking wherever and whenever, unlike I plan on doing, at least for now.

 

       The other equation of the modeling of carfloat operations which is scheduling, also plays a part in the above delineation of 2-track and 3-track carfloats, and will be covered in my next installment.

 

      And so ends Part 1 of "modeling the carfloat operations on the LVHTRy". Part 2 is actually 3/4 of the way written already, so expect it soon, maybe even by Sunday! I'm also sure that this entry will beg more questions, so there might be a Part 3 round up entry as well. As always, thanks for checking in!