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.