THE air-line railway just described can be used for a cash carrier in connection with your toy scales and cash register in your toy store, or can be used for a regular air-line railway outdoors, running from house to house.

After you have made this air-line railway, it will be very easy to work out the next idea, which is somewhat similar. But this railway runs up and down the side hill or the dirt bank out in the vacant lot, where you are playing at fulfilling an excavating contract or digging a cellar for a toy house. The car itself needs almost no explanation after your experience at making the upper part of the air-line railway. This frame for the wheels, shown in Figure 3, is exactly like the one you have just built.

This car too will run on a wire or string L, only in this case the string runs at quite an angle up a side hill and is stretched between a stake driven in the ground at the bottom and a framework at the top, shown in Figure 2 at F. You will need to string the main line I before you can determine just how to make this car. The frame at the top, as in Figure 2, consists of two sticks F and a piece of inch board P nailed together with some short strips f in the shape of a letter A as shown. The board P should be four or five inches wide and about a foot long, while the pieces F should be about two inches longer. The pieces F are connected at their upper end by a crosspiece Dy to the center of which the line I is fastened, running down-hill to tie to a stick at the bottom. All of this framework can be held in place by nailing it to stakes driven into the ground, or the sidepieces f can be cut to go down below the board P into the ground, forming stakes to hold the frame in position, as shown by dotted lines.

At the left, in the small sketch in Figure 2, you can see how to take a spool H, fit a hardwood axle h through the central hole, and fix a crank K on its outer end.

This axle and spool is mounted on the sticks F at K, as shown in Figure 2, and a thread or string which winds around H will fasten to our car to haul it up and down.

When you have driven the stakes and fastened the upper framework in position, you can stretch the line to the stake at the bottom of the hill ten or fifteen feet away and find out the angle for your car.

The car itself, shown in Figure 1 to the best advantage, consists of an inch board A about four inches wide and eight or ten inches long, connected to the wheel frame by small wires a. These wires are of such a length that when the wheels are resting on the wire I the car A is perfectly horizontal. It will take a little experimenting to get this just right, but the drawing shows very clearly how it is done. The railing on either side of the board A is cut of tin or heavy cardboard and is nailed in place, as shown.

Figure 1 shows the lower platform P on the wrong side of the car. It should be placed on the right-hand side under the wire L, although a platform at the bottom is not really necessary for the toy excavating car C - which may be made like the dump car previously described - to run on and off.

The small upper sketch in Figure I shows how the wheels W can be cut of cracker-box wood. First, after marking, the hole 0 is bored with a quarter-inch or 5/16-inch bit. Then the circle, which you have drawn outside, is cut out by laying the block flat on the bench and trimming down with a knife as you would slice bread, taking off corner after corner until there are no corners left, and you have cut clear down to the line. You can then take a three-cornered file and make a V-groove in the rim of the wheel as shown. The axles b are driven into place, and the wheels finally pivoted by the needles or small nails n, Figure 3.

This toy is great fun in a vacant lot and can be varied to suit the ingenuity of each individual maker.

If you use the toy dump car already described, you will have to make the side-hill railway platforms larger. If you want to use the small size, you can make the small car C out of a pasteboard box with wire axles and with wheels cut from cork. The axles can be hairpins and run right through the body of the box.