Tell me I’m not the only one that’s done something this jaw-droppingly stupid lately.
I’m a recent convert from N Scale DC to HO DCC. Starting from scratch (save an Athearn sw1200 I cadged from my brother’s long-since-forgotten childhood collection), mostly sticking with MTH sound-equipped locos. My layout is not up and running yet, but I do have a dead-basic 2x8 setup with a zephyr and a few tracks. Y’know, the kind of tracks that have no bumpers on their ends?
With my son youtubing on the desk next to the small set, I’m happily farting with steam engines, running them 6 whole feet and stinking up the basement. While intent on the ‘problem’ engine, I casually swap locos on the controller. Next thing I know my son howls a warning and dives out of his chair. I jump three feet in the air and look down to see my son, crash-landed on the floor, a $400 4-6-4 cradled in both hands.
This is the fun part of converting from DC to DCC; learning new and interesting ways to smash my best engines to tiny bits. Guess I owe my youngest kid a favour, huh?
My very first decoder install was on a Proto GP9. I installed the decoder, programmed it and couldn’t get it to work. I was sitting at my kitchen table with my Zephyr and a piece of flex track trying to figure it out and thought the heck with it, I’m phoning for help. I phoned up a buddy of mine and he talked me through everything. I had the Zephyr’s throttle maxed out but wasn’t paying attention to it. I did everything my buddy said, clicked over the forward switch and my newly purchased loco went screaming down the flex track, sliding across the table and hit the floor. I was in awe that I got it to move, lol. My buddy says to me Well, is it working? I said yep, thanks a lot and hung up the phone. [(-D]
Well if we are going to have a “competitive boneheadedness” thread then we had best be prepared for lots of entries and lots of winners.
My own example was from the layout of a friend who converted from DC to DCC. However he did a pretty minimalistic re-wire job and retained some of the old power routing turnouts in his yard. As a result I had the yard goat sitting there refusing to move, cranked up the power, and started to fiddle with the power routing turnouts. And THEN I found the right one …
I’ve done similar to what Dave has…and at the time I even thought about going back and turning down the speed FIRST, but figured, oh, I can catch it… Well, I DID catch the sudden rocket, but it startled me when it jumped into action when I foudn the bad conenction, and since I was working on the yard side of my layout…which is where the ceiling slopes down in the room… OUCH.
If all the model rails who have caused their rolling stock to skydive were lined up on one side of a tug-of-war, and all the model rails who actually operate but never had such an incident were lined up on the other, the, `never happened to me,’ crowd would be off their feet and down the street in a heartbeat.
My most recent (but not only) [oops] was written up on the forum a while back - ED141, a Bo+Bo catenary motor which ran off the end of track where I hadn’t installed a stopping diode. Fortunately, the model is about as tough as its prototype - damage was repaired with bending pliers and soldering iron. (Yup, it’s brass. A plastic shell would have been scattered all over the garage floor.) Fortunately, it didn’t take the coal unit it was dragging with it - those cars ARE plastic…
When I was wiring my first reversing loop I was confident that it was wired correctly including a PSAR reverser from Tony’s.
To test the loop I selected my cheapest loco, a Trackmobile.
Unfortunately I didn’t have a camera ready because as the Trackmobile entered the loop the prettiest column of black smoke you ever did see rose up out of the Trackmobile.
Luckily for me, I’d been visiting these forums long enough that I read my share of horror stories about floor-diving trains. So, on my current layout and the previous one, I installed a drywall screw at the end of each open-ended track. So far [!], I’ve avoided that kind of accident.
My bone-headedness involves something different. I’ve made the following mistake not once, but several times: Wearing my “good” clothes when handling paint. First time, I started to shake a jar of Floquil Armour Yellow when I felt wet drops on my shirt: I hadn’t closed the lid tightly enough, so now one of my favorite polo shirts had permanent yellow spots on it [B)]. Did I learn from that? No, several times later I was doing “a little touch-up” brush painting so I figured I could keep the paint away from my shirt. Inevitably, I found myself reaching across the work area [and an open paint jar!] and getting wet paint on my shirt sleeve. So now I try to take the extra time to put on “junk” clothes before I do anything involving paint.
Reminds me of my early days in DCC with a Bachmann EZ Command controller. I had a long freight running on the main and while not really paying attention to what I was doing I was just playing around with the controller. Apparently I called up another train sitting on a siding and it took off at the speed the throttle was set at and before I quite realized what was happening it entered the main and smashed into the train that was already there. Now Gomez Addam’s I ain’t but it was still a pretty spectacular crash!
I did something like that one day. I sent a Bachmann 44-tonner on to the main to take some cars back to the yard, while #650 (a model power 2-6-0) was leaving town with a short merchandise freight and ran head-on into the switcher. Nothing hit the floor, though some cars ended up on their sides…
I have a vivid memory of my American Flyer Royal Blue Comet loco screamning down the track and off the curve at the end of the layout and taking a nosedive onto the floor. My engine never went this fast I guess because my ‘friend’ tried to plug the track straight into 115 volts a.c.! I never should have let him talk me into it, but I was only14 at the time. Don’t know how it survived but it ran OK after I put the transformer back on. The flat spot on the streamline loco didn’t look very good though?
