Making great progress with the layout.
Completed to date:
Framed deck, control console, mainline oval, passing siding with parking spur, one yard siding.
Please comment if you wish.
Are you going to put a layer of foam down? It will make it easier to carve ditches and gullies into the scenery. Even Kansas isn’t perfectly flat.
Steve S
Hi SUX!
Looking good!
I have a suggestion which might give you a little more free space in the area inside the track if the track pieces will fit together properly:
You have used a left hand turnout off of the passing siding to give you a spur to park your mainline engine. Could you use a right hand turnout instead so that the diverging route becomes part of the passing siding curve that leads to the mainline. Your parking spur would then be in line with the straight section of the passing siding. In other words, the straight line on the right hand turnout would lead straight into the spur instead of going through an S curve as it does now. That would move the spur towards the mainline by two or three inches and the spur would still be plenty long enough to hold the engine.
Make any sense?
Dave
Yes, a layer of 2" insulation foam board will be adhered to each modular section of the deck. I will do so after completing the build of at least 3 yard sidings. Right now I am working on building 2, or rather adding a second to the existing first siding. See this thread for a better understanding: Yard Siding Mock Up
The foam will be attached with Velcro because I will have to remove it when I change the layout design. This helps with drilling new holes in the wood layout deck to run wiring through. Once the holes are drilled in the wood deck it is very easy to drill or cut the holes in the foam.
After I add the foam I am going to add a neutral color scenery mat, probably the “desert” colored one.The holes in the foam will be covered by the scenery mat. To run the wiring trough the mat I will simply cut little slits.
The scenery mat will be attached to the foam with the clear 3M Command adhesive strips. They have proven to be very effective at holding the Atlas snap Track in place. Each section of the Atlas track you see on cork bed is glued with Liquid Nails Silicon Adhesive. The cork bed is cut to the length needed then glued to the track. Because the track will slide apart at the rail joiners when the train rolls over it I am using the 3M Command strips to adhere the cork bed with track glued to it to the layout. I discovered this is still a lot cheaper than using Bachmann Ez Track that you see for the mainline and most of the passing siding.
From what I have been told I may be the first one on MRR to design my track sections in this manner. As such I am going to post an instructional thread on the methods I use to d
Yes it makes perfect sense. If I do need more space I will certainly change it. right now I don’t think I will need the additional space.
SUX:
One other thought occurred to me since you don’t think you will need the space. That is that you could have two turnouts leading off of the passing siding creating two spurs. The first would run exactly as you have it now with the left hand turnout, except that the turnout might have to be moved back a bit on the straight section of the passing siding. That would create space to allow you to put in a right hand turnout in front of the left in the same manner that I suggested for moving the siding over. You can never have too many locomotives! Or, it could be a service track.
Dave