A New Year, a New Post

It seems like most of my model railroad projects haven't really been out in the section house. After the Plano train show in January, I traded some unsold locomotives and freight cars for some Walthers, Rapido and Balboa passenger cars. I am starting to build a pretty decent North Coast Limited and Mainstreeter, but I need dome cars for the NCL and more baggage car or mail storage cars for the Mainstreeter.

My next big project is to add benchwork along the southeast wall. This will allow me to have train continue past Billings and add the Sugar Factory on the lower deck and add Parkman, the top of the grade, on the upper deck. This is what it looked like at the beginning of February.

The blue backdrop is all that remained of Shane's layout, I took it down and salvaged what I could.

You might remember the trouble I had finding studs with the stud finder. At some point over the winter I removed a chunk of drywall and discovered the reason is because the 5/8" sheetrock is offset from the studs by 1x4 material, adding 3/4" of air in most places. My solution was to buy some 5/8" plywood, screw it to the studs with more 1x4s and attach brackets to the plywood where needed. Removing the 9" wide strip of drywall with a circular saw was a horrible, messy ordeal, but it made for nice clean edges. Oh, and did I mention the mud daubers in the wall? Luckily it was winter, but not a very cold one.

With the first strip of plywood up, I was ready to add brackets and fascia.

I started by adding heavy duty shelf brackets upside down and attaching pieces of 1/2" plywood underneath with short screws that still poke through, but they can be ground off.

By the end of February I had the fascia extended around the new section and the bottom painted white. I could finally stack some junk on top of it and get it up off the floor.