Blue foam is finally concealed The long weekend allowed me to make some good progress. Here's the Friday night view: And here's the Monday night view: Paint is in progress on the new industry. Primed it with a Testors earth brown spray can. Still deciding whether to just use that color for the brick or to paint over it.
Everyone is making great progress! Todd, as always, phenomenal work!:thumbs_up::thumbs_up::thumbs_up: What is your layout dimensions and radii types again? I might use your plan for inspiration if you are okay with it.
Thanks for your kind words, Strasburg. Smallest radius is around 12 inches. Largest is up around 32". You are welcome to take any ideas you can squeeze out of the trackplan. Here it is:
Painted 78 doors and windows and installed glazing tonight. It will look much better when it's weathered.
Hi all! Sorry for being sooo remiss in updates, been busy! Finished mudding the walls( I hate mudding) Aaaaaannnndddd ( cue drum roll, please) Drove the golden spike!! That completes the ENTIRE mainline, including staging main. I still need to add the 2 extra staging tracks. They're almost 20' each, double ended. The staging main enters the wall at Cameron,Wi. in the first pic( the hole you see) , traverses the perimeter of the basement and re-appears at the left of the first pic, just north of Spooner, Wi. I used a no-lix to get the needed elevation. I laid over 45' of track to finish the main. Next is wiring up the drops and adding safety barriers. Good work, everyone!! Terry
reforestation is underway Planted trees tonight until I ran out. You can see them to the right of the water tower. This view below shows one of the effects I have been seeking. The distance and trees between the relocated Dixon and the Farmers Grain complex help to isolate both scenes.
oNetrak layout Hello Got to sneak away to the dungeon a bit and did some work on the highway bridge for my ADM crossing module. I am modeling a specific place but since it is a oNetrack module I am compressing by feel the different items that are going to be modeled. The real highway overpass is 4 lanes in each direction with breakdown lanes. That scales out to about 8 and a half inches. That would be a bit overpowering on the module. When looking at the options for downsizing it I noticed that Plastruct sheets come in 7 x 12 inches. 7 inches makes a bridge 3 lanes in each direction with decent shoulders. I started with Evergreen dimensions and had decided that 6 inches was simply too narrow. I was going to have to use 4 of their sheets spliced together to get a width I would be happy with. That was going to be some work. Luckily my local Hobbytown carries both brands and the Plastruct dimensions worked out much better. Two sheets of 7x12 .080 for the deck of the bridge. After measuring a couple things using a Con-Cor autorack for clearance checking I have settled on 3 inches in height for the bridge supports. These are in real life 4 foot thick cast in place concrete. In module land they are going to be two sheets of .080 glued together and cut out using a router and a pattern of some sort. Coming up with that pattern is the next step. Here is where the Evergreen sheet size makes that call easy. Their sheets are 6 inches wide so each sheet gives me one 3x12 bridge support. The Beams on the underside are 3/16 I beams. Here are some pics.
Great work eveyone! Nothing from me this past or next week. This cold has me good. Will try antibiotics soon.
I've only been able to work on my layout on 2 days since my last post on Jan 10. I was able to tweak the backdrop buildings so their heights are correct with respect to each other and to the road (which is 1/4 inch foamboard), and I made some refinements on the background tree flats. Earlier today, while starting to take pics of where the road passes out of sight behind the buildings, I discovered that the buildings needed to be shifted to do a better job of hiding the road. This was good because I may not have caught the problem until much later, if I wasn't trying to frame a good picture. On the other hand, it also led to no pics this week, because shifting the buildings to a better location meant I had to spend so much of the rest of my time today pulling up, re-installing, and rewiring all the track that I had repositioned just a couple weeks ago. My next Layout Party steps are to: 1. put lane stripes on the road and secure the road in place. 2. All three businesses (Great Plains Propane, Heller Tin Compress, and Smith-Scharff Paper) have fences along the road...so the roadside fences will go in next. Heller and Smith-Scharff will have some trees along the roadside fences, and all three will have assorted details inside the fences (propane tanks, scrap piles and scrap bundles, pallets of paper). Fences extend all the way around Great Plains Propane and Heller Tin Compress. The side fences will go in next, but the rear fences next to the sidings will not be added until the buildings and surrounding details are done. 3. Several buildings will be built...some will be only cardboard mock-ups, others will be plastic models, and some will be kit-bashed or scratch-built.
Am I too late for the party? I hope not! I have the following list of what I want to do: 1. Decide on a layout dimension. 2. Decide on a track plan. 3. Build layout table. 4. Attach legs. 5. Paint layout top. 6. Layout the track, mark for road bed, secure road bed. 7. Secure tack to roadbed. 8. Figure out the electrical portion of this. 9. Run some trains! Well, I attached the 2' x 4' plywood to a frame 2" x 4" 's to start my layout. Track plan is under this link. I jumped in it alright! - TrainBoard.com On post #3 of the thread, I am looking at building the layout on thumbnail #2. I am going to tilt the oval just a tad so the layout is not entirely symmetrical. What is my best option to put legs on the table, something this small?
Picture Time Got a little further this past week. Managed to get the sub-road bed cut out and put into place. The white risers you see are pieces of plastic board, similar to what is used in hockey arenas. It was a scrap piece from work that I nabbed. It works great, and I can see being able to use it for a lot of different things, so I may just have to snag another piece. Anyhow, pictures are pretty self explanantory. I also have the masonite back drop fastened to the wall. Now I am experimenting with colours for the sky. The camera isnt the best so the colour isn't quite accurate. It stll needs a little blue mixed in there. My plan is to paint sky only for now until I have the terrain roughed up. Then I will try my hand at forcing perspective. We shall see how it goes. I am actually pretty excited/nervous about how it may turn out. Thats all for now, keep up the good work everyone! I look forward to seeing your updates. Cheers,
These Four Walls No, not the song. I'm talking about the four walls of my produce warehouse. My mission for the weekend was to get the two removable walls framed up - mission accomplished. I haven't quite figure out how to hold them in place yet. I'm thinking some sort of pin or peg that will go into holes drilled into the floor. Whatever I come up with, it needs to be easy to remove the walls, but they also need to stay firmly in place when the building is assembled.
It has been a while since I updated progress on the "abyss". Here are a couple of shots of the last section of masonite fascia in Spadra with the scenery base installed (just in time for the layout tour last weekend) This alone is a great improvement over having a 55" "hole" for trains to fall through. Here is a earlier pic before I started this project. Soon I will tape the track and start slinging plaster.
I laid the two through tracks on the lumber mill layout, including power drops (and probably too many power drops at that. I have the two spur tracks clicked into place for the loading docks but I have decided to pick up a few more long pieces of track instead of using an odd assortment of short pieces. I have also plotted out where the mill pond will likely go, and I have my partially completed wigwam burner on the module so that I can see where it will likely sit. Next steps are to get the mill buildings as they will appear roughly plotted and get the bus wires underneath installed and hooked to all my drops. I will likely have one of the most robustly powered T-Trak modules around, having put drops on just about every other piece of Unitrack.
Round Peg In A Round Hole In my previous post, I mentioned that I hadn't yet figured out how I was going to hold the removable walls in place. I've solved that dilemma, thanks to a micro drill bit and some brass wire. I've also changed my plans a bit, deciding to permanently attach the front wall, leaving only the end wall and the roof removable.
I finally got the fiddle yard extension framed together and the doorbolts work well for holding it to the rest of the layout. I built a free-standing leg that the fiddle yard fits into because of its length. I also got the shelf for the Zephyr installed and re-routed most of its connections. I am now starting to work getting the track plan down on the plywood so I can start laying roadbed soon. Peter
Open-Ended Construction The interior planking on the third permanent wall is done. Here's a look inside, with the removable wall removed: Tomorrow I plan to finish the siding on the outside, frame the doors, and then permanently attach the wall to the decking:
Looking good everyone! Finally spent some time on the layout today! Wired the staging tracks ( still one to lay yet) and added a passing siding at Cameron. Sanded the walls, hoping to prime and paint Sunday. I ran a train around the whole layout for the first time today. Took just over 14 minutes at scale speed. I'm guessing a little over 400' of mainline( not including sidings, yard, staging, etc. ) Six 3' pieces left to go for the last staging track. Terry
