Building my own rail road.....

[Kevans]

I am coming close to pulling the plug and retiring. The plan is to go and buy land near the family homestead in Idaho, probably fifteen to twenty acres, and build a house on it.

Many of you know my dark alter ego, that is I am an author of alternate history science fiction. One of the story lines I (and my coauthor / wife) are working on is rail development in the 1630s Germany buy a group of West Virginians transplanted in time.

This topic allows me to do "Research" and write it off as a tax deduction. Grin. Our readers like what we call "weird tech.", in response I am thinking of building a Ewing system road. Link to follow, basically it is a ground mounted monorail, that balances with a side wheel that runs on the ground carrying about five percent of the train weight. Truly weird tech, in my case I think I will run the line from the house down to the main road and the mail box.

The system lends itself to a personal railroad, it can be built along the regular access road for the property, and uses substantially less in the way of grading and rail.

In the spirit of weird, I think it will have a four wheel geared locomotive powered by a three cylinder uniflow engine. Steam will be supplied by a Lamont style generator, and the rolling stock will be about eighty percent in size of the typical two foot gauge rail road.

In total I should end up with close to a mile of "track", a home built locomotive, a flat car, and a business car. (I need a place for the tacky chandelier we bought some years back.)

The project should keep a grumpy old machinist busy for a year or two, what do you think?

Regards,
Kevin

links;

http://www.irfca.org/members/ddickens/PSMTMain.html

and

http://www.steamautomobile.com/northea/lamont.html

[tom c]

Should be a good challenge. Put up pics as u go!

Tom C.

[Mark D]

+1 on what Tom said!
Mark D.

[Kevans]

We have been up looking at land, found some interesting acreage, now we have to get some reports. Most of what we can afford is in the "lava rock and sagebrush" region, that is not too bad as we intend to make a writers retreat, not ranching or farming.

From the rail point of view, one plot has a fair sized gully I could bridge, but that might be a bit ambitious... Grin.

Regards,
Kevin