I have developed a nasty habit. Late in the evening I frequently start up a train on the main and just do a little train watching before bed time. Unfortunately, I have fallen asleep several times, leaving the trains running, for hours! Last night, I woke up at 4:00am all the while my 2 little Atlas MP-15's were chugging along with 10 cars and a hack. I think I fell out at around 11:30pm. I think I'm going to have to set up a timer on the throttle as kind of a dead man's switch. If I set it up to be power on from 8:00 am to 12:00 am, this should do the trick. It must be the clacking of the wheels at the crossing (right next to my recliner) that puts me to sleep.:tb-biggrin:
Not so much with the layout, but I have found that the absolute worst type of DVD to watch late at night is one of the Green Frog railroad videos. The endless strings of vintage equipment is like an amplified version of counting sheep...
When I first got into N back in the eighties, a stamp collecting store decided to carry N scale trains, and its grand opening was so overcrowded, he ended up moving to a new store in less than a year. At that grand opening, two N scalers demo'd a layout that inspired us all. They were enthusiastic modelers, and they often talked operations, which not only in my club is a weak suit, but it is among my circle of friends, as we do very elementary operations, and run trains a lot. Both of these guys kept their layout in the living room, telling us, that they would fire up a train on the mainline, and retire to their recliner, watch tv or read, every so often glancing at the running trains to watch it go through an intersection or pass a piece of scenery or structure. Years later, my N layout is in my living room and yes, I often just power it up, retire to the chair, and watch. Yes, I have fallen asleep too, but if you do that, make sure your power pack has a circuit breaker on it, and you are running newly issued locos, and knuckle couplers that match right on, just in case. So far, cross my fingers, I haven't had any mishaps yet, and right this minute, I am running trains behind me. I think I trained myself to hear when a car falls off and causes a train to jam, or a derail, which will wake me up. The good thing about today's trains and equipment is that they can take it.!!!! In other words, happens a lot, just be careful. Ken "FloridaBoy" Willaman
My layout is in the living room and right next to comuter I'll put a train on or maybe just a engine the forget it and start on comuter and a couple of hours look over and the train is still running just coming into New Orleans [LOL]....Jerry
Not a nasty habit...it's a great habit called having fun! Before I started to build my current layout, I had a double oval built on a hollow core door. No scenery, just door, homasote, cork, track, and train. I would go down to the basement to watch TV with the kids and would always fire up a train or two. I would also catch myself watching the layout just as much as the TV! Sometimes we would have sleepovers down there and just let the trains go all night (no problems with that, either). Jamie
Well... It's okay as long as the layout is a continuous loop... but... if it were a point-to-point... I hope I don't develop that habit at the present time... my layout is presently a point-to-point... wih the ends being a deep chasm to the floor. o2pz:
Back in my younger days when I was dating my wife to be I left her place when the 11 o'clock nightly news came on and drove down couple of streets to the highway where the traffic light, as usual, was red. Next thing I knew the clock said 4:16 and I was still at the traffic light and it was still red. I had sat there for 5+ hours with the engine running and the car in gear and my foot on the brake. Scary!
Ouch. You just reminded me of the biggest "close call" in my model railroading days. As some of you know, I have a modular shelf layout. When I have one of the modules out, it creates a 5+ foot chasm to the floor. Normally, I never have equipment on the layout at such a time, but once I received a brand new set of ABBA locos and just had to test run them. I put them on the track and quickly became distracted by how nice they looked and ran. Suddenly, that feeling of panic hit and I shut down the throttle in a split second. They were about 3 feet from instant death. Whew....
Maybe we need something like the vigilance systems in use on the prototype. Things are more technologically advanced today, but Queensland Rail's (the railway I work for) original system on its diesels consists of a button that has to be pressed every 90 seconds by the engineer or fireman, if not an alarm sounds and if the button is still not pressed the brakes go into emergency. This was developed during dieselisation in the 50's when engine crews used to steam would drift off to sleep on the relatively quiet diesels resulting in a few bad wrecks.
I don't feel so bad now that I'm not the only one who tends to dose off! LOL! I recently showed my wife how turn the layout off in case of an emergency. She's great with scenery but won't touch the engines of controls. That's really a good thing since I'm doing dcc next week.
well, i dont leave them going, except on purpose. i just got a new engine off of ebay, it is an older lifelike GP20, and when i got it it would not hardly move. so i took it apart and put some lube on the gears, and put it on the test track and let it run all night long. then the next morning, before work, i cleaned all the lube off and put a drop of oil on each truck, and let it run the whole time i was at work. when i got home, i put it in reverse and let it run until i got ready for bed. this is a great running little engine now.
It hasn’t happened to me as of yet, but I know it’s only a matter of time because it has happened on the computer. I would awake to the sound of beeps after I typed in a couple of hundred “M”s or something.
Don't feel so bad, I left a older Kato SD40 with 25 MT freight cars and a caboose run for 24 hours! when I was in the army, I got called in for work right after I had got home, I had the power Pack (before DCC) on a switched light socket in my extra train room, along with the lamp in that room, I was hurrying to get a unifor back on and out the door, I glanced over at the door to the room the lights were off, so I though "good everything is off" well what had really happened, the lightbulb in the hagolen lamp had burned out, so really everything was still on. 24 hours later, I walked in the front door and could hear a grinding noise, found the SD40 still running, but sounding terrible, and was kinda hot. I shut it off quickly, let it cool, oiled/greased everything, and it was fine, talk about a break in!
