Pulling Your Hair Out: Model Disaster Stories?

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M

Mike_Arnold

Newbie Modeler
Well I just got home from bowling, and to my horror the front handrails of my SD40 were ripped clean off and laying in nice sections on my layout. I'm just curious of any of you here have had any model disasters happen? Kids, animals, etc... getting to your trains?

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I don't know who did it, no one is fessing up:mad:

Mike
 
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I'm just curious of any of you here have had any model disasters happen? Kids, animals, etc... getting to your trains?
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Nah! I did mine all by myself :o Don't do it very often though :D

Cheers
Willis
 
Mike_Arnold said:
Well I just got home from bowling, and to my horror the front handrails of my SD40 were ripped clean off and laying in nice sections on my layout. I'm just curious of any of you here have had any model disasters happen? Kids, animals, etc... getting to your trains?

DSCF0012-3.jpg


I don't know who did it, no one is fessing up:mad:

Mike
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The Wifey?:D
 


I had my brothers kid here a while back, he was running trains and i went upstairs for a minute and he was running my SD9 full blast but he wouldn't admit it and he hit a kink in the track and it went 4' to the floor, it has a broken gear in the truck and body damage that i need to repair sometime. He is the type of kid that tries to get away with everything and when your not looking will break all your rules. This is the result
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Oh and i have 6 of these, i try to keep them out of the basment but they sneak in from time to time and is hard to get them out because they know they should not to be down there.
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Here are the other 2 , the kittens mom on the left and Mister Bubba
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Most of my problems can be attributed to my own mistakes. Save for a few times when my wife ventures in the train room to bother me, and manages to hit something.
 
Our kids, formerly known as the 3 Little Pigs, survived to become adults and go out on their own. The 2 cats have since passed on to the Happy Mousing Grounds in the sky. While the 5 of them were here all that ever happened was I'd find a few things moved around. Nothing ever damaged. My wife now takes some dark pleasure in relocating the little people while I am a work. One guy was missing for over a week and he eventually turned up on the rear of a caboose with his leg in the coupler.

Otherwise my latest disaster happened when a framed picture on the train room wall fell onto the roof of a back ground building knocking off a few of the roof details. New Haven FL9 Crashes Into Roof of Building was the headline in the Lobuc Valley Times the next day. ;)
 
not really my disaster but tonight a club member gave me an atlas RS that he could not remove the shell on. He said he was gluing the hand rails on and thinks it got down to the frame. He was right. the frame was glue to the shell and walkways,coupler incerts glued to the front and rear plows. I think he used the super thin CA and it just went everwhere. I tried to get it off with the de-bond stuff but it gould not get in to release it. the shell is junk. I think he was not aware that you could get it in thick (gap filling)
 
Mine was caused by one of our giant Alabama beetles. He was talking a stroll across the layout and I didn't notice him. My train noticed him though. Derailed a new Atlas U-33C that was about a week old. It took a dive right to the floor, breaking the shell right in half. The beetle was OK...for about 10 seonds after the accident. :) We grow those beetles big down here.
 
UP2CSX said:
Mine was caused by one of our giant Alabama beetles. He was talking a stroll across the layout and I didn't notice him. My train noticed him though. Derailed a new Atlas U-33C that was about a week old. It took a dive right to the floor, breaking the shell right in half. The beetle was OK...for about 10 seonds after the accident. :) We grow those beetles big down here.
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Sheesh that must have been a big beetle :eek:
 


Not a disaster story but a funny pet story. When my boys were younger we had a Lab that could not care the least about what we did with the railroad. Then my one boy brings home a Husky pup that was hell on four legs. His brother is running his prized BN Gp-40 around. He had added plows and working beacons weathered it, the hole nine yards. He also had a matching dummy, but that was sitting on a shelve just below the layout. Track plan at that time disappeared into a closet and came back out. (Still does actually.) The Husky was fasinated watching it come and go. My son parked the train in the back room and the dog stood there waiting for it. It then spots the matching dummy and trys to push it with it's nose to get it to move! After several changes in household that animal ended up lead dog on a winning dog sled team in Vermont. It was NOT a dog that could ever be happy in the city.
 
well my problem was cause by a former owner of the equipment he had model glue everywhere and didnt even bother to paint it(it had a modeled interior too) so i had to carefully bust it apart and scrape the glue off or try to anyhow. i painted the entire interior and put leds in it. (from the outside it looks like the little building has flouresent fixtures in it) i just got it back together and still have to paint up the exterior
 
'Twas a most momentous evening, that when a streamlined RPO was almost turned to scrap....
Several years ago, for reasons I can only label as a lapse in judgement, my older cousins were in the house. I had momentarily left the "railroad room" and went to the kitchen. When I returned, there were the three mugs "playing" with my trains. Two were playing about with a couple of figures and a freight car, and one grabbed an RPO car and "flew" it around like an accident-prone airplane. When they saw me, they only looked at me in that classic "deer in the headlights" pose, and just to finish business, the chap with the car just smashed it into a farm I had been building that week while retaining the scared look. They were properly tried, convicted and punished.

Since then, only VIPs get to cross the door to take a look.... under my strict supervision.
 
I don't operate often enough to give disasters a chance to happen on my layout. Also, I've read so many horror stories about 4-foot nosedives and other disasters on this and other forums, that I put in some safeguards:

1) Installed plexiglas sheets where the track is <= 6" from the edge of the benchwork; easily removable for shooting photos, etc.

2) Any "inactive" stub-ended turnouts [placed for future expansion] pointing off the layout have a woodscrew at the end to stop any misguided trains from rolling onward to their doom;

3) No pets allowed in the trainroom;

4) I never leave my trains running unattended. Seems like so many disasters have happened when guys stepped out of the trainroom for "just a minute" and came back to find their prized loco(s) in pieces:eek:

So far, these measures have worked [knock wood :o]
 
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Worst experience:

Not on the layout, but transporting models. I was bringing home a passenger train after exhibiting at the club's open house. There were 8 brass passenger cars in one of those flat foam lined transport boxes, and about 6 others in individual boxes. Cat decides he must reach the basement ahead of me. Need I say more? The whole shooting match went down the basement stairs ahead of me, and the transport box with the 8 cars popped open.

Four cars damaged, two seriously. Basement stairwell walls seriously scorched by the language I used as this happened. Children learned about 8-10 new words each. No locomotives in the mix fortunately. Also, the most expensive of the cars were in individual boxes and survived the trip undamaged. There's a reason why those brass car boxes are difficult to open :o

The cat lived, as it was as much my fault as his. I took a short cut by using that transport box, and should have individually packed all the cars.

All of the damage was repairable, and I spent a bunch of time repainting and re-decaling. I ended up with a better train after all was said & done, but I'll never forget the horror when that box opened up on the way down the stairs.

It isn't the initial impact of the model hitting the floor...it's those small tinkling sounds of detail parts scattering to the darkest corners of the basement that gets me:eek::eek:
 


Puss in boots?

Could have used a cat to prevent the disaster that happened on the 1st M&WV. I lived in an area which flooded like a beast every time it rained hard. Whenever this flooding occurred, the field mice (and an occasional rat) would find their way up toward the houses in the old mine patch where I lived.

A meece family decided to make their home (unknown to me at first) under the layout in behind some of the boxes I kept under the layout. I started to notice that some of the natural trees I used on the layout were missing some of their branches, which were occasionally scattered across the track. Then, there were the O scale horse turds I kept finding. (Wrong scale, wrong era and just plain WRONG, period!) I began a systematic counter-rodent search of the area, found the enemy's hiding place and booby-trapped same. Two bodies were found, searched for intelligence and disposed of.
The remaining enemy dispersed to parts unknown.

Then there was big brother Rat. Mr. Rat never got upstairs, but he made his presence known in other ways. He was caught on the Ho Chi Kitchen Trail attempting to make a supply run and was gunned down with an Airsoft Thompson SMG shooting 400 FPS with .25 gram 6mm plastic BBs. He too was promptly disposed of...what was LEFT of him that is.

None of the critters ever came back after that.
 
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