The tree fell on 2 trains

I am glad all is well after tree fall.

 

I like your Christmas layout. could you post more pictures of it. 

 

Thanks

 

 

When our cat's were kitten's we got to decorate the tree multiple times due to poor structural engineering. We've since learned how to keep a tree upright through any minor storm or nuclear attack.

 

Glad everything and everyone is okay.

 Once I get it back up and running, I will post more, thanks!

Marty;

You must have a cat in the house!

 

Rod

Wow, I thought I was the only one here who had their tree fall over. 2 years ago, in the middle of the night. Hardest part is getting the sappy water out of the carpet. 

 

Gandy

Glad to hear everyone's OK.

 

I feel your pain on a tree falling.  It's been 11 years now, but I had a monster tree one year that fell down twice.  I did not have trains set up yet at the time, but I had lights on the tree for the first event and even had a fair number of ornaments on for the second event.  Somehow, I lucked out and nothing broke either time.

 

I had tried one of those plastic stands (I normally use a "traditional" steel red bowl with 4 green legs stand) due to the large diameter of the trunk.  For my case, I believe part of the problem was the screws.  The plastic stand had these little plastic discs (which I maybe could have removed in hindsight) on the ends of the eye-screws and I think all that did was make the interface from the screws to the trunk more slippery(which let the massive tree shift around). 

 

I ended up with screw holes (into the studs!) in the 2 walls in the corner of the apartment where the tree was set up.  Washers held strings under the screws which were tied to the center trunk to keep it from falling into the center of the room.  There was no way I was letting a third fall happen after all that trouble.

 

Hope everything turns out OK once you fully recover your tree decorations and train set up from the fall.

 

Found a pic:

 

 

 

-Dave

Dang that could have made for a BAD Christmas.

Rod - no cat

Gandy -  the sheet helped,  I have it lifted and we rotated in a lot of towels. So far it doesn't feel sticky...

Dave - I now have 2 eyehooks and some string assisting the hold up.

 

Tomorrow morning, I'm going out for a stand. This one is cracked. My son and I will lift the tree, my daughter will swap out the stand, my wife will direct. Wish us luck

 

 

 

I can't see any possible way that could go wrong!!

 

Rod

As noted above, you are not alone.  Just yesterday, after I was in a friend's house

to go with them to a funeral, and they were concerned about a tipsy tree, after

the event, I left and they began its decoration.  I warned that the stand's "feet"

were possibly too short for the diameter and size of the tree.  After and under the weight of decoration it apparently collapsed in a tangle of wire and broken ornaments. Irate? Uh-huh! Last email says a new tree and stand were promptly acquired.

Sorry to be a critic,but the tree looks out of scale for the layout.

 

Dale H

Hmmmm

Well... It's back up and as you can see from the before picture, it was a good sized stand, but it was plastic, more than 10 years old and at least post tip, cracked. We have a Christmas party to go the new stand seems fine... Next year, I may take Dale's observation and insist on a scale tree. I will even agree to scale, of the guinness record for tallest Christmas tree so long as it a traditional Christmas tree and not some 3000 yr old Sequioa, someone decorated.

We actually had to do this about 15 years ago. It was touch and go for about 15 minutes but it did work.

 

Jerry

Marty,

   Sorry about your downed tree, but hay you have one heck of a layout, it looks great!

Keep us up dated when you make changes, love to see more of your layout!

PCRR/Dave

Marty R - Did you see this? It's floating around facebook, and I'm assuming it's your layout.

Our tree goes in a room with a 12 ft. ceiling and we have traditionally had trees tall enough to fill up the space (of course, my wife's doing ). About 15 years ago the tree fell a few days after Christmas. The fall broke numerous ornaments and took out a blade of the ceiling fan!  After that disaster I put eye bolts in the wall and the tree gets tied up every year. Also, found a great stand for taller trees.

 

No more mishaps.

WOW! That's the layout circa 2009/2010 maybe. PLEASE send me a link, I'd like to try and trace it back. It had to have come out of a post on this forum, as I didn't have facebook then. That's hysterical, yet disturbing.

 

To defend myself, I need to fit 12 months of O scale into 6 or 7 weeks...

You don't need to defend yourself. You have a right to do whatever you want with your trains in your own home.

 

Phooey on the guys who posted this. Anything, like this picture,  posted on the Internet can be read and copied by anybody.

RoyBoy
Thanks, I was defending myself in the humor of the post. I want more than 6 weeks of o gauge. I need a patron groundhog. " sorry honey, he saw his shadow, 6 more weeks of trains". The original is from a February 2010 posting of Christmas 2009 on  trainboard. It is also posted with caption on an irishrailwaymodeler.com, but I can't join to post about it, as I don't know what train pulls traffic at the tara mines and I don't have a reference.
Scary thing is I Google the image and Google found the captioned and un captioned versions... that was new to me.

Speaking of a tree falling, go to the 3:57 min. mark of this:

 

 

Can anyone get too much of Miniatur Wunderland?

So how does one Google an image?

 

I think it's time to loose some living room furnature permanently.  If you can live this way for 6-8 weeks you can do it all year.  You might become a bachlor though.

We have some close friends that had their tree roll on them just before Christmas Eve.  He was trying to hid the new sweeper behind the tree when it rolled.   He took the stand off and screwed it to a 3' square of 3/4" plywood.  Very sturdy now.

Go to www.google.com,

Click on images in upper right,

Click on camera in search box,

type or paste image URL and hit ENTER.

Doesn't always works tho, I typed in the image URl for the image from Dave45681s post:

https://ogrforum.com/f...e/DSTree_OGR2013.jpg

 

and got some really weird similar images found:

WEIRD

 

Jerry

 

In Chrome on windows 7, right click on the captioned image. One of the options was to Google that image

One thing I don't miss about cut trees: hauling in the tree stand.

My sisters knocked over the tree a couple of times when they were little, so Dad put screw eyes in the window and door frame on the wall. We tethered all of them after that (and still do the artificial one.) One year the tree was fine, but it kept inhaling all the water and the stand broke.

That was enough; when Dad came home from work at the mine shop, he'd raided the scrap pile. We had an 18" square of half-inch plate with a piece of 4" pipe with holes blown in it welded in the center and a slightly shorter piece of 6" pipe welded around that. I have no idea what it weighs, but it's heavy. It holds almost a half-gallon of water and anything in it does not tip over.

Marty you have a very nice Christmas layout.  Like you I only have a couple months of running my trains.  My Christmas layout this year takes up most of my living room (2 times the space than the picture below!)  I had to even move furniture out into the garage this year to make room for my layout!   

 

This accident happened in 2006 when I was trying to fix a set of lights behind the tree.  The tree was not stable because I placed the tree on bricks to elevate it.  I leaned  too much into the tree and it came crashing down onto the layout.   It caused several passenger cars to derail and a few broken ornaments, but I am thankful I had no broken trains.  My family already went to bed.  If it were not for this photo, they may have not believed me because I got it cleaned-up within a few hours and got it back to operating order!  Ken

 

 

My dad, not taking any chances with eight children tugging on the branches and an occasional cat climbing the trunk, secured the tree with a guy-wire running from the top of the tree to a drapery rod bracket over our front window. 

 

 

 

 

What, me worry?

Too tired to post a story right now, But its nice to see that I too have some company when it comes to falling trees. Glad everything got fixed up ok!

I would venture that the real root cause of these accidents is the fact that virtually all store bought trees come from tree farms where they regularly prune trees to make them "bushier", "fuller" and of course conical.  This adds much mass to the tree and besides making it nearly impossible to place free hanging ornaments (instead, they lay against the tree) it makes them inherently more unstable.  With the conventional wisdom of designating all non-artificial trees as "natural", there is a movement afoot to designate "wild" grown trees as "organic."  Some call them Charlie Brown trees, but I tend to favor them, if for no other reason, the variety and more interesting form and natural beauty (imagine if all people were groomed to look the same).  Besides, why would you want to bring a pesticide covered tree into your living space?   

Growing up we always went into the forest and found a tree.

Best ones were the top half of a bigger tree.

The rest became firewood.

You see, the bigger trees fill out like the sheared ones naturally.

 

Yes, We had a Permit, besides, My uncle owned a Sawmill and lumber yard.

No, they were not hard to get where I grew up, there is lots of Forest.

 

Now, we've been using a fake for years, No watering, no fire hazard and for my wife, no needles all over the floor. I do have to find the right candles for the proper scent of Christmas now. Last year I went and got a wreath and hid it in the tree  

All was well until I had to remove it, pine needles again...

I'm working on a plan tho...

I don't use a real tree.  I don't even use a "decent" fake tree.  This was my grandfather's fake tree, so who know how old it is.  It's been passed around the family a bit, and I ended up with it because everyone else wanted a good looking tree.  I don't really care about the tree, it's what's under the tree that counts!  Anywho, our two cats mostly leave it alone, maybe take an ornament or two off to play with.  This year though I have a 11 month old boy that wants to use the tree to lift himself up to stand.  My wife has caught him and saved the tree twice.  But the tree is such that I don't worry about it if it will come down, not enough there to hurt anything and we don't have any glass ornaments.

 

 

 

Just a nice short simple train around the tree.  I already have a double loop on the floor of the living room behind me as I took this photo.  I did have to swap out the CW-80 for an old AF transformer I have.  I hadn't used the CW in a while and the fan is now louder than the sound of the train on the FasTrack on the bare tile floor!

Marty,  Sorry about your accident, I know the feeling.  My tree fell twice in one year when we had a certain dog visiting! Looks like you even have the same type tree stand as we do!   

 

 

 

That is one great Christmas layout!!  

I think the real question is...

 

DID IT MAKE A SOUND?

A picture says a thousand words......what an expression...and some say dogs don't talk.......

 

TEX

Steve

Tommy, me and the wife call the "wild" trees I Love Lucy trees. They look just like the ones in the Christmas episode and in like most old Christmas movies. Franks Nursery and Crafts used to sell them in Baltimore back in the early 80s but they're gone now and no one seems to have trees like them anymore. They are great for that old fashioned look and they have all kinds of nooks and crannys for the ornaments.

 

Jerry