Saturday, September 28, 2013

Ramping Up

It's been a busy summer with a lot of travel for work and nice weekends to take our new travel trailer out. I've been thinking about the railroad and what exactly I want to do. First was to decide on the height of the benchwork. I needed to lower it from the previous layout to clear the outlets on the 3 walls, so a couple weeks ago I cut all the legs down 3" from 48" to 45".
Cutting the legs to 45" in the back yard
Also, I really wanted to reuse as many of the modules from the previous layout. I started moving them around a little and hit on a brilliant idea today. I took the two modules that used to be the East and West staging yards and placed them over my modeling workbench. These modules are only 18" deep instead of my standard 24".
Benchwork over my desk is only 18" deep.
After placing these two and a corner 24" deep module, I still have one remaining 24" x 48" module that I used as a peninsula. In the photo below, taken from the doorway into the garage (the door to the backyard is to the far right of the picture), you can see the peninsula and the rest of the layout. Imagine a connector track across the open space and that's the layout - 10' x 10'.
Outside wall, 24" deep by 10'
Now I can place some switches and noodle on a few track plan ideas. Maybe ... possibly... have trains running by Christmas?