note: the guy wasn't drunk at the time but it still happened. had an incident tonight. a member was carrying an Athearn RTR DRGW SD45 when he fumbled the engine while carrying it. he was asking another member (DRGW_hero) why the unit was sitting on the layout with a missing piece. he asked the question how the piece broke when the engine fell from his hands, bounced off a crosspiece in the benchwork and crashed to the floor under the layout. DRGW_hero's response was "like that". all the major parts that broke off, the fan's. the snowplow, and the sunshades, not to mention numerous other parts. the roof looks bare with all the parts missing side shot. in the back near my hand you can see the hole where the handbrake was before. nothing there now. drooping numberboard. the shell has a few cracks in it and he never found one windshield piece. still runs though. survived better then we though. the owner is trying to decide to use it for spare parts or to fix it. this is why you don't carry an engine while drunk.
geez, what is it with Rio grande units falling to the ground. My Athearn SD40-T2 took a fall from about 4 ft throught my shelving and all it suffered was a broken coupler, plows and the nose come off which glued back together
I've been thinking about getting some of the padded floor mats like you see at places like Menard's to help cushion falls to the concrete floor - and help relieve back pain from standing.
This is why model railroader eticate is very important. If the model is not yours, you should not handle the unit. If you do and you damage the unit you should offer to fix or replace the unit. That is the way that I feel. Sure I have family and friends that are modelers, they know how to handle the models very carefully to prevent this from happening 98% of the time. I understand that accidents do happen. But there are a few select locos that I dont let anyone touch. Just my thoughts on this.
Good thing trains are not slippery like fish and..a..!!! Kevin, email me off line and I will send the most unusual "fish" story about what my son "rescued" a half a mile out at sea. You wont believe this until you look at the photos included! Watash
Yep-the floor is a magnet. Not only will your nicest loco take a dive, it will also probably be your heaviest. My "new" Mantua Pacific went around the track three times before deciding it needed to do a header-on the opposite side of the table from me, of course-from 4 feet high to the floor. It accelarated so fast on the way down, due to gravity and its weight, that I could see heat trails due to friction as the zymac casting tore through the atmosphere. The impact with the basement floor was felt for several miles around-and the lone peice of plastic on the old Mantua, the locomotive pilot, vaporized. But I was sober. Back when I drank, I was holding my AHM C-425 in my hand and started to walk towards the track loop I had laid out on the floor-about 10 feet away. As I started to walk, I tripped over my feet and did the Snagglepuss dance across the floor-staggering towards a gravity inspired impact with the center of the train loop. Put my hands out, droping the loco, and caught myself as I hit the table. I had a moment of that wonderful, drunk, "Aw...that didn't hurt" self analysis right before I felt that extreme pain in my right cheek. Lower cheek. I got up and found chunks of the former engine imbedded into my hip and backside. Not real deep, but deep enough to require SLOW removal. Needless to say, I had to bad order that engine, and my right cheek. -Mark
I didn't handle the unit. I used it earlier in the week, and the owner was wondering why i left it on the siding. And when a Sunshade was missing he asked how i broke it, and then he dropped it and BAM.
If someone dropped one of my engines, I'd probably ask them to buy me a knew one. If a person can't handle loco's safetly, they shouldn't handle them or be prepared to buy a new one and the damaged becomes theirs. I would not be happy camper.
When I was a youngin, was running a proto E8 and it got knocked off the side of the layout.. Needless to say it doesn't run like it's supposed to..
You've seen it all when you watch your 2 day old o scale restoration project dive off the table. I've never seen it accelerate that fast around a curve. Needless to say, it survived all right, but the wall it flew into didn't. I now have a poster covering the hole in the drywall where the engine buried itself up to the quarter mark of it's boiler. I guess that quality really was better back in the 1950s era of lionel, seeing as how the engine only had a few scratches on it. I was pretty happy. it still even runs!:tb-biggrin:
