DR Tom Visits.
Dr. Tom came over this afternoon. It was my intention that we would work on setting up a good operations system in the Valley division between Harlow and Crooked Creek.
That didn't happen I had an electrical anomaly in Harlow, which resisted immediate diagnosis, and in Murray, where the passing sidding between Crooked Creek and Harlow is use of an off brand electrical tuner melted the white glue that holds the ties down. when it dried it fused the throw bar to the roadbed, so the next time I tried to throw the switch, I broke the solder joint on the homemade ground throw.
So Tom looked around at the changes to my RR, and ran the track cleaning train through Crooked Creek, which helped him reacquaint himself with the weird way the power routing switches are set up there.
When he left , I went to work trying to diagnose the problem in Harlow. Usually with my stub switches I have a solder joint break at the frog or down near the "stubbs where the two diverging rails are nest to each other. those were fine on this switch, and i had had the solder joint break where the wire attached to the outside tail. this was almost invisible even before the track was ballasted so I wasn't too embarrassed when I figured it out with the help of a multimeter.
The first photo is a close up of the offending switch in Harlow. See the offending solder joint. . . . .? I didn't think so. the 2nd photo is zoomed in even closer, and there it is. I made it to be hard to see, now I need glasses it's hard to find.
the third photo shows the broken homemade ground throw, and the fouth shows # 19, with track cleaning equipment, after the ground throw is fixed. # 19 is a PFM Cherry River Shay, which has a NWSL re-gearing kit installed. It has the track cleaning cars attached just to clean it's wheels. It is way too slow to use for track cleaning trains. by the time I got done cleaning the whole RR, it would be time to start over again.
The Valley division is open for business, and the aisles have been cleaned up. time to run the track cleaning train up the mountain, and work on the tabs to get ready to start training crews for Tab on Car operation on IRON MOUNTAIN.
Bill Nelson