One Down, Eleven To Go What a blast! The guys in the Southeastern Division sure know how to throw a convention, and Dubuque was a great place for one. This was my first convention, and I'm hooked. Well, hooked because it was fun, and because I'm now on the board of the Thousand Lakes Region, as the new Public Relations guy - move over Gerry Leone! Enough of that, on to the important stuff... That, ladies and gentlemen, is a merit award for the NMRA Achievement Program, and is the first of many steps towards obtaining my MMR certification. I went to Dubuque with one goal, to earn a merit award for my produce warehouse. I accomplished that, and also took first place in the online structures category, earning 99 of the possible 115 points. More photos from the weekend can be seen in my photo album, but I warn you, some of them are clearly "cheesy vacation photos".
Congratulations on the award good sir! From reading your thread it is greatly deserved I loved the step by step-so detailed and a great read! Makes me want to get into scratch building now
Thanks everybody. I thoroughly enjoyed this whole process. Now I have to decide what the next structure will be. One of the clinics at the convention was on scratchbuilding wooden trestles, and since one of my AP structures has to be a bridge, I'm kind of thinking I might tackle a small wooden bridge... Stay tuned here, and watch the blog!
You know I thought you couldn't make it look any better then you put that ribbon next to it. Congratulations and well deserved!! Again thanks for sharing the ride with us. Looking forward to the next project ratled
Warehouse Lighting The first structure that I built for the layout was Johnson's Produce, the large wood-framed produce warehouse. It will always be one of my favorites, if nothing else because it was the first one I'd ever built from scratch. However, seeing it there on the layout next to the depot with interior lighting, it seemed to be missing something. It needed lights! When I first started this layout, I wasn't sure if Hill City had electricity in 1920. I've since learned that there was indeed electricity available, which led to me put lights in the depot. The product warehouse was finished long before this discovery, so it didn't get lighting installed. Until now. Complicating the installation of lighting is the removable roof and/or rafters on the warehouse. I built it so that it can be displayed with no roof at all, or with just the rafters exposed. I didn't want lighting to interfere with this, or to force me to permanently attach the rafters. Using small-diameter brass rod, I found a way to install the lighting and keep the roof and rafters removable. I made power feeders using the brass rod, running the rod along the rafters, just like electrical conduit is done in real life. Once this is painted with some dark brown paint, it should essentially disappear, blending in to the rafters themselves. If you look closely at that last photo, you'll notice two pieces of brass rod running vertically down the back wall. Those are my temporary leads that go down through the floor and to the main layout power. To facilitate the removable rafter concept, I'm going to replace these with smaller diameter rod. Where you see these now, I'll be installed two pieces of brass tubing, large enough to accommodate the smaller diameter rod. The tubing will be attached to the layout power, the rod will be attached to the power grid hidden in the rafters. When the rafters are on the structure, the rods will go inside the brass tubing, providing the electrical connectivity to power the lights. When removing the rafters, the rods will simply slide out of the brass tubing.
