Doin' what you gotta do...

We can get ourselves in trouble sometimes.  Self-caused mistakes are some of the most frustrating as they are usually quite avoidable.  This photo is one of those stories.

Final scenery over at CP294 has been filling in, as I’d mentioned last month, and as a direct result several other things happened.

Below 294 is deep staging.  Wiring for the track power through CP294, along with the signals, switch machines, and accessories is tight over the top of the three tracks.  In my excitement to make progress, rather than move all the trains from deep staging and leave them all over the main line, I decided instead to use painter’s plastic drops gently stretched over the top of deep staging to shield them from any debris that might fall down.  It worked great - until I knocked the last car of the grain train out while removing the plastic.  It hit the floor and while it survived, the end was bad enough with a broken main coupler box and frame that a rebuild would be untenable for operations. I was pissed - that’s an expensive $55 mistake. 

As I fumed, contemplating options, it occurred to me that this would perhaps be a good ‘wreck repair’ load, on cribbing atop of a flat car, with the trucks removed.  I had always wanted to do one of these after seeing the ones available from protoloads.com and other custom builders.  In fact it’s a great car for that - and while I’d never do that to a functional superdetailed car, a broken one is a perfect match.

So I did some online research and found some photos.  I proceeded to add more damage to the covered hopper to simulate a full end collision….and now needed a flat car to carry it.  Luckily I found a nice new ScaleTrains flat car in my to-do pile which needed only assembly of the wooden deck and final weathering. 

Sometimes when you make a mistake, you just gotta do what you gotta do and make up for it.  I think this came out as well as it could!