MDC HO and HOn3 Shays?

True but they still have to be maintained... and that isn't cheap either.

dlm

If only the obverse were also true.

Gee, I wonder when the US government will drop out of teh sugar subsidy game? Perhaps you could ask Morticia - er, uh, Kaherine Harris - who is a child of such subsidies.

On 2/21/2008 11:52 PM P. Roehling spake thus:

Russia's relationship with Cuba is intensely political, as you very well know. If present-day Russia was not under constraints to renounce Communism, as it is, then it would probably still be Cuba's primary trading partner. And the way things are going, with Putin chafing under the US's continued imperial thrusts and demands, and with Russia aligning itself against the "west" on such matters as Kosovo, Iraq and Iran, it's not inconceivable that they might once again decide to subsidize Cuba.

By the way, I know firsthand about Soviet support of such regimes, having been in Nicaragua in 1988; one of the most poignant things we saw was the Soviet mobile field surgical unit being used on the grounds of the hospital in Léon after much of the hospital building was rendered unusable by an earthquake. The other amusing thing was the fact that a Soviet delegation was staying at the same hotel with us; we joked about how they seemed like fish out of water there, and always stayed together in their own little group at meal times, never interacting with any other guests. Nicaraguans had a complex love-hate relationship with the Russkis; on the one hand, Nicaraguans were grateful since they kept the country going in many ways, but on the other hand, there was a huge cultural dissonance between the two groups. (My main impression of the Nicaraguan people from that trip is that, like most Latin Americans, they were party animals at heart, not a bad thing to be.)

I guess I'm in a minority here as well but my Shay has given me few problems. I did buy the updated NWSL drive but never got around to installing it. Never seemed like I needed it.

The three truck Shay did give me troubles & I wasn't really able to resolve them. I had to leave the 3rd truck unpowered but the guy I built it for didn't seem to mind.

Like Jerry, I had to wire my trucks together as well.

One thing that I did to improve the performance of my Shay was to liberally coat all of the moving parts with toothpaste. Not the gel kind but something "pasty" & gritty like Colgate or Crest. I ran the engine propped up on a kit box for about half an hour that way. You could easily hear the mechanism running faster, smoother & quieter as time went by. After the half hour, I disassembled everything & cleaned it thoroughly, removing all traces of the toothpaste, reassembled it and used a little graphite in the gear tower and some thin oil on everything else and it has run well ever since. In fact, I once made a video of the engine moving so slow that it took about four minutes for it to travel its own length without stopping! You could look in the cab and actually see the motor slowly turning. It neither bound nor stopped; it was just a constant slow turning.

I'm not sure how my Shay would run now as it has been packed away for quite some time.

Finally in the discussion of the MDC Shay, don't forget that a company, I think it was Walker Models, actually made a replacement boiler for it. That was a long time ago, but I think the boiler was more linear than the one that was part of the MDC kit. Did they call it a shotgun boiler? I've never seen one in person, only pictures of the completed, modified model.

My 2¢ worth...

dlm

On 2/21/2008 11:07 PM Greg Procter spake thus:

I imagine they're like Hawaii's sugar-cane short lines, another U.S. colonial territory.

"Steve Caple" wrote

If I had my way, we'd be out of the farming subsidy business tomorrow morning. It was a good idea when it first began, and 90% of American farms were owned by the farmers who lived on and worked them, but now the huge majority of farms are owned by super-corporations who bank the tax-payer funded subsidies, and pay very little in return.

But are you seriously equating our government's subsidys for -largely undeserving- US farms with the former USSR's foreign aid to Cuba?

Hello? Does that have anything to do with the subject at hand??

She certainly has a lot to do (through her voter roll manipulations) with the cowardly draft-dodging weasel in the White House being there, and I haven't heard anything from his quarter regarding ending subsidies to those wealthy Florida Republicans sugar barons from which she sprang.

Thanks for the note. It's always a bit supportive to find someone whose experiences match your own. BTW, do you think there might be others here who are interested in model railroading? Naw, probably not.

Jerry

Dan isn't the only one to have success with the toothpaste trick. The Late John Selkirk of Sault Ste Marie did it with all his new engines.

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"Pearl Drops" was the lapping compound of choice for smoothing out Athearn drives. But it's getting hard to find in the grocery store these days.

Len

It was recommended in this group several years ago.

I had to go to every Drug Store around before I found it at RiteAid. One tube should last for at least 500 engines. *8^)

Paul

Well yes, Cuba bought it's railway equiment from the only obvious suppliers in the region, the USa. In point of fact, it was the owners of the sugar and fruit industries that built the railways - US corporations.

"Steve Caple" wrote

I frankly doubt that the present continuance of sugar subsidies -along with every other big-business subsidy- bears directly on the fact that Katherine Harris did her level best to throw the election in favor of Bush -and I don't doubt for a moment that she at *least* tried. (There were lots of folks who helped Bush steal that election, though, and she's just one more "the-results-justify-the-means" right-wing fanatic.)

The good news is that the American public has gotten a real eyeful of what happens to a country that turns it's government over to a bunch of extremists, and public opinion seems to be swinging back towards the middle again.

The bad news is that if the Democrats manage to screw things up as badly as we all know they might, it could easily go back in the other direction again.

Your "middle" is the civilized world's "far right".

Regards, Greg.P.

Thank you oodles and muchly!..

"Greg Procter" wrote

The fact that you think you're singularly qualified to define "civilized world" is the reason so few people bother listening to you on any subject except model railroads.

On 2/23/2008 7:53 PM P. Roehling spake thus:

Except that he happens to be dead-on right about this. The world outside the Untied Snakes of America is a far different place from the comfortable cocoon we've woven around ourselves.

"Wolf K." wrote

And you'd be wrong; which is not an uncommon circumstance.

I dislike autocratic governments of all sorts, including our current administration.

My, but you *can* act like an arrogant little prick when the spirit moves you.

Straw man. Nobody said it was.

Hint: If you want peace, Wolf, don't do things that are calculated to start a war.

I mention this only because flinging three insults in the space of one paragraph, and then following them with "Peace", demonstrates that you're unclear on the concept.