Exploring the World of Model Railroading
After painting the cork, what more is there left to do on the roadbed? It feels like all these mundane things you do inch you towards a milestone, and when it finally arrives you don’t really feel it, or you keep asking yourself: “Is there anything else left?” Left before starting the track work that is.
Moving at a snails pace, or more precisely at the pace the caulk dries, I finally completed laying the cork sheets down across the entire Staging deck. This took about a week, as I worked in stages, couple of hours each day after work, and letting it dry overnight.
Yesterday I went and got some 24″x36″ cork sheets for the entire staging deck and thought I would be spending the weekend laying them down, but other things came up…Sometime ago I realized I should’ve kept the lower deck open on the peninsula – there’s really no good reason to have a backdrop there. So, before securing the top surface on the peninsula, I decided to remove a 8″ tall strip of backdrop hardboard, up to the uprights.
It was a long way to here. In retrospect, have I known that it would’ve been this much work, I might have opted for some other hobby. Bah, who am I kidding…
Sunday came and I thought I would be able to move onto putting plywood up right away. As expected, other things had to be done first, namely installation of 4 additional cross braces on the newly finished portion of the metal benchwork. That took the whole morning till noon to complete, despite opting to use wood instead of metal for the braces (metal would’ve taken longer to fabricate). Either way, better part of the afternoon was spent fitting plywood surface on, and it was a gruelling task.
Spent the Saturday doing errands, among which was purchasing 5 sheets of plywood for the staging deck. In the late afternoon/early evening and I started feeling guilty for not accomplishing much today, so in a moment of inspiration, I hashed out the remaining metal benchwork on the staging deck. That area has been sitting empty without benchwork for almost a year, but no more…
God knows why I waited till the last moment to order the track and turnouts…believe it or not though, I made changes to my staging plan hours before ordering the parts. In a moment of panic I realized that I could use large turnouts instead of medium, duh. So, I replaced all medium turnouts and then placed the order. In retrospect I’m glad I did this, except that I shouldn’t have waited till the last moment to do it.
