Today I returned to the Gulf Coast after being away doing various remote errands for the last three weeks. I went down to the layout to get it ready to operate again in the next few days. I cleaned the track and then got the 5 tray A-line tote with the engines and cars.
I wasn’t watching what I was doing and put the tray with seven locomotives too close to the edge of the layout. It went down to the concrete floor in a heartbeat. Fortunately, most of the engines were in the tray on impact, but some flew out onto the floor. If there was ever a coronary, this was it.
I looked down all these scattered engines, and like a real railroad man didn’t dwell on the accident, but immediately began to assess the damage to work out a repair and recovery plan.
First of all, several of the wheels were knocked out of the tender trucks. Once I got them back in, I put each engine on the track one by one and found that they all still worked, a miracle.
The next step was to assess the damages to details which were several. With events like this, the tiny parts will often fly into orbit and never be seen again , but it was my lucky day and I found them all. Several footboards were broken off of the locomotives, but I already have a repair plan for them. Bachmann engine steps are not very strongly attached to the locomotives, with little plastic lugs fitting into holes in the pilot and tender beams. I’m going to drill the broken lugs out of the pilot and tender beams, then make replacement lugs for the various steps out of wire which will be a lot stronger than the original attachment.
A cab roof hatch broke off, but that will be easily resecured, and one glass came out of a cab window. Naturally, it’s the one right behind the engineer and hard to access but I’ll get that back in.
In less than a minute, this terrible accident was immortalized as The Great Gulf Coast Tragedy. 
Anyone ever have anything like this happen? There’s no sound quite as terrible as the crash of model railroad equipment hitting the floor.
