Now that I've managed my Labor Day goal of getting my track down (all 20 ft of it), I've discovered the wheels of my Bachman 44 tonner exude black gunk. After a just a couple of weeks on a shelf, it stalls randomly on shiny rails. It's particularly sensitive to track irregularities (nice of it to point those out), and starts up again with just a breath of a push, so it clearly has dead spots on the wheels.

It's become fashionable to call the throw bar of a switch by its proper name: switch rod.  Now, I'm all for using the correct terminology, but it seems to me that calling the giant chunk of PC board that keeps model switch points the correct distance apart gives these abominations more credit than they deserve.  If, on the other hand, we call it a throw bar, and conceal it somehow, we give ourselves an opportunity to create a nice model of the switch rods themselves.

I have been trying to get an approximate answer on this for quite some time. It seems nobody knows. The usual answers I get are like:

- I just buy more when I run out

- I have a 5 gallon pail and it's all I'll ever need.

- I have a box if it, and don't think it will do my whole layout.

My problem is this:

We left off last week with the straight(ish) stock rail in place, congratulating ourselves on a good evening's work, considering we started with bare plywood.  This week, we got through most of the rest of the engineering, with the exception of the switch rods.  I hope to get those and the remaining details done by the end of the week so I can get back to house construction, and clear up the turnout mess.