Supplies!

I got my supplies in the mail today! I ordered them from Fifer Hobby and they came in less that a week. This is the second time I have ordered from them and both times I have been very pleased, unlike some other online stores.I also touched up the plan a little bit and added in some terrain. The lighter green areas are raised, the dark green lowered. I am debating if I want to raise the hill in the top left even more and add in tunnels for the tracks back there. A few more buildings are needed to fill in some of the empty spots as well. I marked the two spots that I would like to have structures in but have no idea what kinds of buildings I would want to put there. There should also be a put a small building at the end of the road on the right, but I have one that just needs a bit of fixing up for that.

Progress and Revised Plan

I have been refurbishing the track I salvaged from my old layout that I scrapped last week. Mostly this has involved scraping off the ballast. Some of the turnouts were damaged when they got pulled up; the plastic ties on the point end started to pull off of the rails. I fixed them with some super glue, or in one case, removing the damaged ties, and sliding on a section of ties from flex track. The foam on the table now has a coat of brown paint on it as well.

While I was at Home Depot picking up another item I purchased some Rust-oleum Stone spray paint. I plan to spray the road bed with this before laying the track. This way I won't have to ballast so heavily to cover up the cork. I forget where I heard this tip but I am excited to try it out.

A yard running the full 80 in. of the layout seemed a bit long for my switcher to be running up and down. I laid out some flex track and cars on the layout to get a sense of the scale and confirmed that it really did feel like an expanse compared to my old layout. I redesigned the layout to replace the yard with an interchange track (now at the top of the layout). A hill or scenic divider will obscure the top left part of the interchange track from the rest of the layout so it can double as a sort of staging area.

This arrangment fits in better with my operational plan of having cars be delivered by a foreign road, have the local switch crew do the set outs and pickups from the industries and then send off the cars back to another road. It also means I have to buy fewer switches. Before I would to have purchased 3 switches, now I can do this plan with only buying one, or none if I decide to scratch the extra siding by the interchange track.

Demolition

I did it; I tore up the old layout today. I had decided that I probably wouldn't get as much as I had hoped for the layout. So I used it for scrap. I was surprised at how much usable flex track I was able to pull up. Some of the switches came up ok, others had some problems with the ties pulling away from the cork roadbed. But the good news is that they can be fixed pretty easily with some super glue.

I reused some of the foam to cover the last bit of the new layout. The rest of it will be used for making hills.

Fail

Last night I leaned the layout up against the wall to get it out of the center of the floor after attaching the foam insulation to the top. I came home today and the foam insulation had fallen off. I will have to try again with construction adhesive.

New Layout in the Works

I took the plunge and have started building a new layout. This one will be the same width (32 in.) but almost double as long (80 in.). I had originally planed a 36 in. wide layout but realized that 32 in. was just about as far as I could reach, and since this layout would be up against a wall, 36 in. wide would have left the last 4 in. unaccessible, so I narrowed it.

It is similar to the plan for my existing layout in some way, but has a number of improvements. The first area is the yard. In addition to being designed for longer trains, the new layout has all the yard tracks directly connected to the yard ladder. Previously there were two tracks that were separated from the ladder by a short track. This short track was rarely used since a long cut of cars on it would block access to the other siding. The yard also has a switch lead that is not part of the main line.

I also added in another passing siding on the side of the layout to allow me to allow some more flexibility with switching.

The layout will be build on a framework of 1 x 2 topped with luan plywood. On top of the plywood there is 1 in. pink insulation foam as a base. I framed up the layout last week, and just glued down most of the foam today.