FOUR-ONE-FOUR.

Milwaukee's area code, which used to extend beyond city limits, is 4-1-4.  Thus, even though the telephone carriers have overlaid area codes as if they seek to tile a plane with irregular polygons, Sudsville boosters make today an opportunity to tout Milwaukee, bad drivers and injured basketball and baseball players notwithstanding.

I did attend high school in Milwaukee, but to this day crack wise about having to leave because I kept missing the five pin with my first ball of the frame.

Those fours and ones have another meaning here at Cold Spring Shops.

The model is increasingly like the prototype, it was built a quarter century ago, it moved a few freight cars, and it occupies space at the works.

WATCH THIS SPACE.

The train room at Cold Spring Shops headquarters includes a powered display track orbiting the basement up high.  It's reliable enough with properly tuned rolling stock to turn it on and let a train run while I'm working on the main level, or perhaps catching up on my reading.

The video features a number of trains going through their paces up high.  A few test runs up there or on the State of Maine Northern are sprinkled in.

The video description includes the new You Tube indexing feature, pick whatever train suits your fancy.  Enjoy all 21 minutes if you wish.  Yes, there are two scales (British Gauge O and North American O Scale) and three countries (United States, United Kingdom, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) showing off.

MARKING OFF.

In the Milwaukee area, the historic telephone area code was 414, and people use the day to celebrate all (good?) things Milwaukee.  Here, Four-Fourteen (to use the calendar locution, rather than the telephone company locution) has its own meaning.

The locomotive has featured in a few videos, most recently the record of the recent Open Day during the O Scale swap meet, and the first was running in, to musical accompaniment, on the test plant. 

I've got this hankering for long, rigid-frame steamers.

Thank you for looking in.  I'm going to take a few days away from social media.

ROLLING OUT THE TRAINS.

The March Meet has concluded, and with it the layout tours.  I had a sequence of trains staged to have something moving whenever things got quiet, although layout visitors were of a mood to swap stories, and a few wheels didn't turn.

Even with a limited amount of the track available for running trains, there were plenty of switching opportunities, which are excerpted in the video.

The upper level display track also got a workout, and the Special Projects Office showed off its work.

OPENING DAY.

Because of the brief Major League Baseball lockout, the planned early April season opening opponent for the Brewers was rescheduled as part of a summer doubleheader.  The next home stand begins today, 14 April, with the Cardinals in town.  As Milwaukee is the traditional 414 area code (there might be some overlays) the powers that be in baseball were somehow persuaded to have the first pitch thrown out at 4.14 PM, consistent with a local celebration "of all things 414" called Milwaukee Day.

There'd better be a lot of beer for a Brewer game at Borchert Field County Stadium Miller Park American Family Field.

Count the wheels, even the steam locomotive gets in on the 4-14-4 act!

WATCH THIS SPACE.

The Chicago area O Scale swap meet might have been one of the last public events of March 2020 before the politicians panicked.  The Gloucester Branch was available for layout tours during the show.

The show, which hobbyists refer to as the "March Meet," will take place during the first weekend of April.  Between the corona restrictions and the shakeout of capacity in travel and entertainment business over the past two years, lining up host hotels has become more difficult, and at least one of the larger shows will not take place in future.

The Gloucester Branch will be holding open days during the meet.  This year, it's not going to be the Plywood Central everywhere.

There's a possibility of more than a cameo appearance by a project some 20 years in the making.

Expect a situation report after the show.

OFF THE WORKBENCH.

There's still work to be done configuring the engine truck to lead the frame into turns, and the trailing truck is a little out of tram.  All the driving wheels are on the rails, as are the tender trucks, and there's a better chance of having this making powered circuits of the basement.

The winter season approaches, and materials for construction projects down cellar are being laid in.

WATCH THOSE WHEELS TURN.

It's just a short clip of the Andreyev 4-14-4 being track-tested.  Rest assured, I had hoped to record a longer clip, but you know full well that a piece of machinery that works well when nobody is watching will develop gremlins when the camera comes out.

Stick around, there's more to come.

ON MY WORKBENCH.

It's been a while since we last looked at the Andreyev 4-14-4.  Rest assured, I've been debugging a number of annoying short circuits and binds in the mechanism, plus an unforced error in putting the tender trucks under the tender backwards (must be a senior moment, years ago I painted the port side ends of the axles red; then I put them on with the red marks to starboard.)

What can be more Soviet than hero project steam locomotive in front of a steel mill?

Stalin couldn't make it disappear: perhaps his curse is that any model of it will be as difficult to get running as the real thing ever was.  That's where a little Yankee stubbornness and a few choice cuss words (take your pick, Slavic, German, Anglo-Saxon) come in handy.

FOUR-FOURTEEN.

In Milwaukee, today is an opportunity to pay tribute to their historical area code.

At Cold Spring Shops, we have our own Four-Fourteen-Four, and it was designed for a twenty ton axle loading.

There's an annoying short circuit in the tender.  Perhaps with all this extra time to putter around the house (in addition to the confinement to quarters, northern Illinois is experiencing another late-onset spring) I will troubleshoot that and have it turn a wheel or 32.

THE PROTOTYPE MOVES.

An enterprising archivist has turned up Soviet Nauka i Tekhnika (science and technology, comrade) footage of the one and only 4-14-4.

That's a fair number of gondolas on the drawbar. If what we are looking at here is the locomotive's delivery trip to Moscow, it did a bit of work before being withdrawn to the Shcherbinka test plant.

My plan for the model is to make up a batch of six-axle battleship gons, to make the case that Comrade Nyetnyev invented the unit coal train.  I also have some work to do now, as this is evidence the real thing actually did some socialist labor!

WATCH THIS SPACE.

Facebook reminded me this morning about the state of the railroad, five years ago.

Progress as of 17 January, 2012.  Furring strips in, wall insulation going in, extra lighting in, no grid yet for the drop ceiling.

Much of the work over the next four years was to build from the northwest corner to the east and to the south.  By 12 January, 2016, the benchwork for staging and the trackage down to staging and up to the Gloucester Branch was in place, and spline for the upper level was going in through western Russian town of Zudnokhovsk.

Main line, station siding, and spur to corrective labor camp in place at Zudnokhovsk now.  Stalin never had beer delivery like this!  Passenger train headed off the Eastern Route Main Line into staging for Ipswich, Portsmouth, and points north.

ON A RUSSIAN WORKBENCH.

This video, probably from somewhere in Russia, probably in a scale smaller than O, is another effort to build a model of the Andreyev 4-14-4.  It's interesting that the builder painted the wheels and motion before assembling the chassis.

This mechanism has two gearboxes, which is an interesting way to relieve stresses on the connecting rods, although the motor now has to turn two worm gears.  There's still some hesitation at the ends of the strokes, something I've been working with as well.

The radius rod is mounted in neutral, which makes the task of rigging the combination lever to crosshead and valve stem less challenging.

Let's wish the builder continued success.

FOUR - FOURTEEN - FOUR.

The running gear requires more tweaking, but I still intend to haul some freight cars with it.

I still resolve to move more model freight cars with it than the prototype did.

WORKING ON THE RAILROAD.

Cold Spring Shops stood down for the weekend in order to show off the railroad during the March Meet in April layout tours.  About forty people stopped by between the Friday night and Sunday afternoon open houses.  The trains depicted on the video were running.

I had hoped to run the Andreyev 4-14-4 but there's a short circuit somewhere.  That's de rigueur for model railroads, they run fine when nobody's watching, but when observers are present ...

Got lots of compliments from visitors wishing to see more at a future open day.  Back to work.

ANOTHER PICTURE SURFACES.

I thought my research files had all the existing photographs of the ill-fated Soviet 4-14-4.  Here, from The Guild of Equestrian Railroaders, is another that some intrepid soul found on the Russian archive Yaplakal.com.

Unattributed Yaplakal.com image retrieved from fimfiction.net.

The locomotive does not appear to be in steam, perhaps this is its delivery to the Shcherbinka test track.  All the wheels appear to be on the rails, so I wonder what all the men are paying attention to.  The viewing angle helps with the modelling.

That was December, 2009, with snow on steppe, and the engine truck off the rails.

ON MY WORKBENCH.

It's been a while since Cold Spring Shops featured this.

The Boston and Maine P-4 from Weaver pulled the demonstration circus trade at the recent circus and model railroad show at the Carmel Clay Public Library.

The Andreyev 4-14-4 operated briefly, before an eccentric rod failed.  It is still my intent to make it operable, and when it does operate, it will have pulled more freight cars in regular service than the prototype ever did.

MODELLING EFFORTS.

Put in a few minutes an evening a few evenings a week and the project soon nears completion. The air tank saddles and air tanks are in place (the rear saddles also support the boiler) and a few handrails, steps and pipes remain to finish the locomotive. The tender has a bit more body work to do.

Fireman's side, 9 February 2010.

I uploaded an extra-large image, click on it for a larger view.

SUN AND SNOW.

What is Soviet engine without winter?

The Steppes of DeKalb, 12 December 2009.

(I must work on airbrushing out those executive boxes in Crisis of Capitalism acres in background.)

WHILE I'M IN GRADING GULAG.

 We salute the efforts of our comrades the combine drivers in bringing in the harvest before the first snows dust the steppes, and we wish all faculty continued solidarity during the struggles of examination week.

5 December 2009.