Engine Facility Nearing Completion

Here are two shots of the Bachmann Engine Maintenance Facility that I have been working on. The building is pretty much complete, but I still need to do some work on the concrete pad that it rests on.
There were some areas of the kit that I felt were poorly designed. The attached parts shed (not pictured) had two identical side walls. The walls were both beveled in the same direction, rather then in opposite directions so the bevels both pointed toward the inside of the building, as was the case with the larger walls. Even though the shed was pictured outside of the building I got the feeling that it had really been designed to be placed inside the building. There were also extra parts included that appeared to construct a raised platform for the shed in the instructions. However the pictures from the box do not have this.

I painted the brick walls with a light gray wash to highlight the mortar lines. I think this came out very well. I also painted a majority of the gray parts, beams, doors, ventilation fans, silver to give them a more metallic appearance. The one thing that I was not happy with was the discoloration of the window panes by the plastic cement. Overall I was pleased with the way the model came out however.

New Building

I purchased Bachmann's Locomotive Maintenance Building kit from Ebay a week or so ago. It arrived a few days ago. I opened the kit and examined it. The biggest drawback is that the kit does not have a floor. This should make assembling it a big more of a challenge. But is also good because it makes it easier to add or remove from a layout with track already laid.

Tonight I worked on constructing a styrene concrete pad to place the building on. The pad is the level with the top of the rails creating a flat surface. The biggest problem is supporting the styrene sheet. It is ok resting on top of the ties, but further out from the track, the cork road bed stops and there is a 6mm. gap between the bottom of the styrene and the foam ground. I am working on constructing edge supports to hold up the styrene up and make it appear as a block of poured concrete.

Staging & New Building Arrangment

I was contemplating a trip to the store to get flex track and turnouts for my new staging yard, along with a trip to the lumber yard. Then I realized that I had enough spare parts and the platform from my old layout to work with; I could construct a staging yard with old parts.
It is laid out at a slight angle to the platform to match the approach of the interchange track from new layout that will connect to it. This does have the disadvantage of not being modular so if I ever build a third layout then it might take a little work to get it connected. But I will try to focus on finishing my current layout now. Maybe once I finish it and get bored I can sell it on Ebay to fund a new layout. But that probably won't be for a year or two.

I also re-arranged the buildings on my layout to give the appearance of a street down the center of the layout. The one tricky part is the area between the back of the freight depot and the siding on the other side of the layout. It is not wide enough to squeeze a building into without looking cramped. I also got around to gluing the freight depot back to the layout. I had to build it up with a few pieces of styrene on the bottom so that the freight deck matched the box car floor height.