Amfleet Part 1

I received a Kato Amfleet II Coach for Christmas this year. The only problem was that it was too long and had too big an overhang to fit through one of my four tunnel portals. I had gotten a little bit sloppy with the track center spacing on this turn, but at the time it did not matter since all my existing stock ran without a problem. The passenger car could still run it on the inner track of my layout but not the outer track, which is the one that goes to the hidden staging area.


Re-laying the outer track with the correct track center spacing through the tunnel portal was required so that the passenger car would fit. I also decided this would be a good a time as any to take on another project I had in the back of my head. Even though my layout had hills and tunnels, all the track was on the same level. I wanted to have a slight change in elevation so that the track on the far side of the river was slightly higher than the track on the near side. My hope this change would help visually separate both sides of the river and give the layout a better sense of 3d space.

I decided to use the Woodland Scenics Subterrain foam riser and incline sets to achieve this. This worked pretty well for the right hand side of the layout where I had to re-lay both the inner and outer tracks, to add an incline and adjust the track center line respectively. I was able to lay glue the incline in place and then trim off the extra once it had dried.

On the left side of the layout I only needed to re-lay the inner track so I numbered each section of the incline and trimmed it to individual pieces before gluing it down.

Some of the roadbed has been relaid already. I also ordered the Kato expansion set with coach and cafe car to build a complete train. I am waiting for their arrival so I can test the clearances between the two tracks before finalizing the right of way and securing the tracks.