What do you get when you combine one of Jenn’s favorite games (Railroad Tycoon) and the RV lifestyle? You get a railroad car fitted out for fulltiming! That’s just what we found as we were passing through Jefferson, Texas a couple of weeks ago. The Garden Club has acquired the personal car of Jay Gould, a railroad tycoon, and restored it to something close to it’s original splendor.

The car had four staterooms for passengers, two of which were adjoining with a bathroom, including tub and shower between them. The others all had their own plumbing, even if a bit primitive by modern standards. There was a couch as well as a pullman bed in each of the staterooms. The car would be able to take on water at the same water depots that the train used. We didn’t ask, but I assume the black and gray water would have been simply dumped along the tracks as soon as it was generated.

There were two rooms devoted to cooking with a pass through between them. Based on the layout, I would assume that the car originally had bunks for two servants, but only one of the kitchen cars still had a pullman berth at the ceiling. The icebox had something I think we could all use today, a glass door. How often have you opened the fridge and stared at what was there while deciding what you wanted?

In addition to the above mentioned rooms, the car also had an observation/lounge room and a dining/office room. Many RV’s today have a table that fold out from the wall with a leg that folds down to support the table. The design is more than a hundred years old! Jay Gould’s car had slots along the side where a table with a folding leg could be secured to place a table wherever it was needed at the time. The observation room included a speedometer so that Mr. Gould could see how fast the train was moving and call the conductor if he wanted to go faster. Apparently, Jay Gould was often in a hurry to get somewhere.

The entire car was lavishly appointed with a different decor for each room. How much of this is original is hard to say, but the Garden Club has done an excellent job recreating what must have been a very high class conveyance in it’s day. You can still see the original mother of pearl buttons to summon servants and the glass fixture with Jay Gould’s signature jay bird, which he would draw when signing his first name.

If you’re ever in Jefferson, I recommend taking the tour. It’s cheap and the ladies will tell you all kinds of stories about Jay Gould and how he was connected to the town during the heyday of the railroad. The town also has some interesting ‘antique’ shops full of all kinds of junk and a hotel that dates back to the days of the wild west. Overall, it’s a gorgeous small town with a nice drive along the Texas Trails system if you’re tired of the interstate route.

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Portableacguide.com

It looks like I may have found an even better unit for us. At 543 watts, that little Danby unit may actually be able to run at 100% during the day without too much battery buffering if we put 4 or so 160W solar panels on the roof.

5,000 BTU should cool 1250 cubic feet of space. I’m guesstimating 25×7x7 for 1225 cubic feet – and there will be a lot of dead space inside that for storage, bathroom etc that won’t need to be cooled.

Too bad the rest of the day wasn’t as productive. We looked at 8 or 9 RV’s and put 200 miles or so on the pickup. No luck. Time to start planning for next weekend.

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Amcor Nanomax A12000E

Also, we may have found our next home. We’ve got an appointment to go check it out tomorrow morning. I hope it looks as good in person as it does from the pictures. Also, it would be good if it runs.

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We’re trying to avoid longterm costs like running a generator and camp ground fees as much as we can. We figure that a solar installation should pay for itself pretty quickly with campground fees of $30/night in many places. Also, we’d really rather not run a generator constantly both because of the noise and the gasoline costs.

Now, with solar power, we’re going to have a relatively limited amount of power to work with every day. One of the biggest concerns is staying cool. Once we get out of the Florida summers, I think fans will work a lot of places. However, we expect that we’ll probably want air conditioning if we can possibly manage it. I really thought it would be a simple thing to find a low amperage air conditioning unit. Let’s just say I now understand why our power bill was halved after an A/C upgrade.

So far I’ve only been able to find two different units that I think we can manage on a mid-range solar install. And they’re both pretty damn pricey.

There’s a native 12V roof unit from DC Airco (who’s website looks like it had a stroke in 1995) it claims a peak draw of 300 watts and 4400 btu. The unit plus mounting kit runs about $4k – installation not included.

The other unit is the SolCool Millenia from SolCool. It runs on 110V and claims ‘less than 400 watts’. It has an impressive 16k btu which is way more than we need. I think about 7k btu would probably be a little on the high side. It’s a ‘portable’ style air conditioner, so it would be taking up space somewhere inside the RV. However, it does have some handy accessories available. Apparently it can be converted to a heater and the dehumidifying effect can be harnessed to produce purified water (supported by the manufacturer!). This guy runs ‘about 3k’ according to the sales rep.

I’m leaning towards the SolCool unit a bit because it would be a lot simpler to remove the unit later and sell it separate than to try and convince the next owner of the RV that he should pay me an extra 4k for the after market AC. So far though, the SolCool folks don’t have the latest design specs up on their website and the sales rep that promised to send me a pdf still hasn’t done so.

There is at least one other option that is pretty cheap in both energy and dollars. Evaporative cooling would work pretty easily if we weren’t starting out in Florida where its usually hot AND humid.

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