A construction update

I've spent most of 2017 adding benchwork to the southeast wall of the section house. It's been a slow grind. Other other things have sucked up my hobby time. Also, because much of the time I'm working on the layout by myself, there's a limited amount that I can do a few hours a week. Anyway, I thought I'd share some progress photos.

So in March I went to Tulsa for the LDSIG/OPSIG weekend where I was asked to present. Of course, I took the opportunity to operate too, including on one of my favorite layouts, Jim Senese's Kansas City Terminal.

Bernie Kempinski was the featured speaker and I was able to get him in a selfie while he was selling some of his great books.

I also operated on Steve Davis' KCS which I first saw when it was in about the same stage my layout is now.

Tom Fausser has a new layout based on a waterfront warehouse district in New Jersey.

By the end of April I had brackets up and the beginnings of an upper shelf.

I needed to remove the track from the section of spline the was completed because the latex caulk didn't work well. You can see the track has come unglued here.

I had a few folks over for a work session including Matt Latham here with Eric Mumper behind him. Did I mention that you can never have too many clamps?

Things were starting to get messy as I added spline.

After the work session I stuck this piece of curved Masonite backdrop in to help give the illusion of a backdrop. This piece was from my old Camas Prairie layout and it's been held together as a curve for the last 14 years or so.

Sometimes you forget to read the fine print in eBay auctions.

With the track in, by the end of July it was time to add some paint to the valence and backdrop.

 I told TJ about how much fun painting was and he couldn't wait to help.

One of the dangers of painting track above your head.

 My resistance soldering iron is my absolute favorite tool for adding drops.

 In August, I started adding foam base scenery.

Unlike most of the US, 2" foam isn't easy to find in North Texas. This came from a company in Lewisville that makes walk in refrigerators. Foam goobers were everywhere.

It does make a very nice flat surface and is super easy to work with a hot wire cutter of a saw. This section is between Lodge Grass and Parkman and will be rolling hills covered in cheatgrass with the north end of the Bighorns in the distance. Below is the Billings yard.

At the end of the peninsula is Lodge Grass. The buildings below are just being stored, but the Billings freight house and TOFC will be at this end of the yard.

I used small pieces of thin Luan plywood as a screw base for the Tortoises and then hot glued the base to the Masonite spline.

As of August 15, this is the state of the expansion. I spent a couple evenings vacuuming up all the drywall dust and foam goobers before I start removing more drywall to support the lower deck.

I need to build a swing out bridge at the door for emergency egress. The upper deck is wired to the west end of Parkman, which is above the turntable. I still need to add two more Tortoises and more foam scenery to give the area a hilly feel. I also need to figure out how to create some photo backdrops of the distant hills and mountains. I'd like to get back to operating, but I want to have track in along the wall on the right so the trains have some place to go past Billings.

Drop me a line if you are interested in visiting. I work on the layout most Saturdays and Sundays in the afternoon and evening.

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.

Holiday update

I took a couple weeks off after the DFW Interchange but one thing that was nagging at me was the lack of staging. I remember reading that my SP&S buddy Bob Willer in Kansas City had written a short article in Model Railroad Planning a while back describing his battleship staging yard. This is portable staging yard that can be moved around as needed. I decided something similar was in order.

Starting with the 4 dominoes from the switching layout that Matt Latham and I built for the 2013 LSR convention in Irving, I started working on a staging yard ladder that takes off from the end of the layout near the Yellowstone River bridge. The staging yard track is also salvaged. I used Altas #6 switches from the old layout and Micro Engineering code 83 flex track. The old switching layout had 1/2" Homasote covering it.

A couple weeks later, another domino and more track. I wasn't working on the layout ever night like I was leading up to the DFW Interchange.

By the second week of December I had use all four dominoes and all the track from the switching layout, but a test showed is wasn't quite long enough. Oh, and I had wired the lead so that trains didn't stall out.

By Christmas, I was able to show my mom my layout progress. A lot of changes since she had seen it.

By the end of December I had added a 5th domino and had all the track in, making the staging yard 20 feet long. It will be interesting to see how I move it.

July Progress

July was a very busy month. After the open house in June the layout room was clean and ready to be torn up again. Of course, the bad thing is that when the room is clean I can never find my tools, so I spend most of my time hunting.

After the convention, this is what the Billings yard looked like. I needed to figure out a way to get the turntable pit installed close to the backdrop.

Yard looked like a stub yard at the beginning of July.

I decided to cut a template with a big plunge router and then use a trim router to cut the actual hole. 

Here is the crappy trim router from Harbor Freight. It died about 3/4 of the way through and I had to finish with a rotozip.

This is what the hole looked like before I removed the template.

And with the pit dropped in. I still need to get the correct screws to hold it firmly in place.

It didn't take long to lay the rest of the yard tracks.

A closer view of the west end of the yard ladder.

I had to insert ties in the gaps where the flex track comes together.

At the end of July I went to Durango, Colorado with Speed to take the Soundtraxx Academy. It was a lot of fun and one of the highlights was seeing their surface mount assembly floor. Here is a production worker testing decoders using a functional tester that they have special built to emulate a locomotive.  

We rode the Durango and Silverton on Saturday with the Soundtraxx group.

On Sunday we went over to Chama and rode the Cumbres and Toltec. It was a spectacular weekend and I highly recommend it to anyone.

June update

In June my NMRA Division along with the Dallas area division hosted our Regional NMRA convention in Arlington. It cut into my progress some, but then again it encouraged me to get the layout ready for my first open house.

The focus since May has been the Billings yard area. I started by drawing a line from one end to the other where I thought the mainline needed to go. I used a laser to connect the two endpoints. We will see that I didn't really have the right location in mind on the right side where the mainline needs to be near the wall in order to make the turn around the room to come up the wall on the left of this photo.

With a line drawn, I laid the first track in the yard.

Billings has a small yard with the double track main going down the middle. The prototype doesn't have a proper yard lead, so neither is my model. Since the yard isn't a classification yard, it should be OK. I picture mostly block swaps and some trains terminating. It will also give a place for cars to be blocked before switching the Billings Industries.

Looking back the other way, I tried to keep all the tracks from being parallel to the edge of the benchwork.

Before the LSR convention we had a joint division meeting in Allen and Soundtraxx came and demonstrated the new Tsunami 2 decoders.

Here's a short video of the first train on the lower level with cars.

I spiffed the place up a little for the open house. Also, I placed the three Walthers Double Track truss bridges temporarily. 

This is a much of the yard that was done by the time of the open house.

By the time the throngs of people came (5) my number one helper Katy had unboxed a bunch of building that were packed away.

We were able to run a couple trains back and forth.

After the convention I took the family to Frisco, TX to visit our new National Computer Gaming Museum. Among other relics, they had my first computer a Comodore Vic20.

Next to the Video Game Museum is what someday may once again be a train museum - the former Age of Rust museum from Fair Park... not the Museum of the American Railroad. Unfortunately, it's not open.