Exploring the World of Model Railroading
After yesterday afternoon’s progress with installing stringers on the North wall, today started rather slow, with chores and house things to do. But it quickly transformed into a full-blown railroad building session. By midday all stringers were installed, and by the the late afternoon all the metal track around the perimeter of the North wall has been completed.
It snowed quite a lot on the Christmas Eve here, making it all nice and white, like in a Christmas fairy tale, except that today was another day of shovelling snow, uggh. This Winter better not keep like this, I got a layout to build, can’t be spending time on cleaning snow damn it.
Yet, more progress to report, the late afternoon/evening was very productive as can be seen from the photo below.
I spent the day contemplating whether all 3 decks need to be built on the peninsula all at once or not, but more on that another time…A more immediate snag came up where some of the fixtures are in the way, while other accessory items need to be redone altogether. That’s what happens when you are building a railroad in a finished basement…
Without much fanfare and after good portion of the day spent in moving materials around the layout room to clear space in the middle, we have groundbreaking.
I recently had an opportunity to stop at the local HD and browse throu…oh who am I kidding, I planned to do this. I spent almost two hours at Home Depot on my day off.
First had to rent their cargo van, then some time to find a suitable dolly/platform (during weekdays it seems they are hard to find – all the contractors beat me to them), then put all the goods on, pay ($$$), and then quite a bit of time loading it all up into the van (I was on my own, and these are 10 ft. long pieces, meh).
A two part video from a PECO Instruction DVD circa 2000, with good advice for anyone entering the hobby.
Dated by timeless information covering the whole process from scale selection, layout design, benchwork construction, laying trackwork, wiring, scenery as well as operating.
