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.