My nine-year-old daughter & I are building an N-scale shelf switching layout for the summer. Even though layout design is one of my trades, my daughter brushed aside my ideas & jumped on Byron Henderson’s “Alameda Belt Line”: a 1’ x 6’ shelf designed to fold in half for portability.
She does have good taste: the design includes a long runaround to facilitate switching an oil company, wharf, team track, and a large fruit canning industry, with off-layout traffic transferring by carfloat and an interchange with the Southern Pacific line.
She also likes the local: Alameda, near Oakland, California, is a short car ride away from us, so it looks like she’s picked up on Dad’s San Francisco Bay Area pride, too.
I redrew the design for Atlas Code 55 track & for the Fast Tracks templates I use to hand lay turnouts, added one more siding to service a brewery (Dad gets thirsty), and renamed the industries for fun or based on local lore:
Having moved on average once a year for the past 11 years, we wanted to keep the hinged design for portability, but we also wanted to have structures on the layout. My brilliant brainstorm (if I do say so myself), was to insert a 3” piece between two sets of hinges and a 3” backdrop / vertical support on the far left of the layout: now, instead of pancaking, the shelf wraps into a box with a 3” gap between sections, an interior space for structures & scenery.
The shelves are ½” MDF cut from one 2’x4’ piece. The three sections are not of equal width: the left (“base”) section is 12”x36”, the center is 11 ½”x3”, and the right is 11”x36”. This allows the permanent attachment of 4”-tall strips of 1/8” masonite (cut from scraps salvaged off a previous layout, but could come from a single 2’x4’ sheet).
Here’s the basic benchwork, stretched out:
There are 1” MDF strips under each section edge, with four adjustable 7/8” furniture feet at each corner of each 3’ section.
Spray-painted the backdrop flat dark grey primer, and the boards Krylon ultra-flat khaki.
I constructed a 6”x7” box out of scrap masonite & MDF to house the DC power pack:
A roof with detailed parts will fit over it for photography. A masonite front cover with DCC terminal can also be screwed on to the box.
The Oil Tanks are 4” & 2” ABS caps. The large tank, at 2 1/2” high, will be permanently attached to the layout. The two smaller tanks are removable, and serve the dual function to cover the front two pairs of hinges:
A removable power house will cover the back pair of hinges. Those three structures should be the only non-permanent buildings on the layout: all others are flats, low relief, or positioned to not get hit by the backboard or any other structure.
I laid a small section of track over both joints, and then cut the rails when the gorillaglue cured.
One of the goals for this layout is to do as much ourselves as we can, or at least use up much of the train stuff I’ve accumulated over the past couple years. We’re using Atlas C55 flex track and building our own turnouts using ME C55 rail on PC board ties. We use Fast Tracks printable templates as guides, but adjust to our needs. Given the close position of many turnouts, I tried to build as many as fixtures as I could:
The addition of the brewery required a crossing (between two turnouts) that started curving immediately after, so got to try out building a crossing for the first time:
Turned out pretty well. Did it rather quick with a lot of eyeballing (& NMRA gauging). I’ll build a better one next time.
In a great moment in father/daughter bonding history (no CA involved!)(except the state we live in!), I taught her how to use a soldering iron to build turnout:
For the first couple we used the jig I’ve had collecting dust for a couple years. Then she had to test it out with a truck:
So now she knows how things are glued or soldered together, about hard & soft metals, and why not to touch the soldering iron tip, even if it’s to show your daughter why not to touch the soldering iron tip.
We gorillaglued the pc board ties of the turnout fixtures to the MDF base for added stability, but used caulk for the flex. Having no foam in which to push T-pins, we used canned veggies to weigh down the track while curing.
Drilled feeder holds, soldered to rails & used suitcase connectors underneath, and then took the SP NW2 for a spin:
There it’s on the wharf deck we built out of pcboard ties and 1/32” x 3/64” basswood strips. After that photo, we painted the pcboard ties to match the stained wood.
A thin layer of Magic Water coated the thin strip off the wharf as well as filled in the carfloat quay. After we install the permanent carfloat, we’ll use Modge Podge to create wave / ripple effects.
And the most incredibly exciting part of N-Scale model railroading: tie replacement!
The PC board ties are slimmer than Atlas flex or even the ties Fast Tracks sells, so I slip 1/32” x 3/64” basswood strips (after a dip in my “Big Jug O’ Stain”) under the turnouts. Tedious. Luckily, “family bonding” also includes a Chopper II, thin strips of white glue between rails, tweezers, and my daughter sharing the joys of tie replacement:
We masked off everything but the track, made sure the turnout points were covered, and then, working in thirds, we sprayed the rails with Floquil Grimy Black, scraped the railtops with bits of wood, and then brightboyed the heck out of it:
It was such a sunny, hot day that by the time we pulled off the masking, the paint was dry!
Right now, we’re going back and touching up the points & the ties around them with Grimy Black & a small brush.
That’s it for now.
Next on the agenda:
–building & installing the carfloat
–building, painting & installing the long “Bella Fonte” fruit cannery flats along the back left
–build the power-pack roof-cap
–start figuring out streets & ground cover
–keep practicing running those trains & shunting those cars!
Thanks for slogging though a bunch of posts & pictures.
Hope to have more before school starts in a couple weeks.
Cheers!
School just started, but we’ve managed to get a little more done.
So we started putting together the “Bella Fonte Cannery” (based on the Del Monte facility on Alameda).
Bashing two Gripp’s Luggages into a 25" long flat:
My daughter sprayed it “Red Oxide” primer.
It will have an awning & concrete dock in time.
As well as a mortar wash & weathering.
You can see the original here http://www.flickr.com/photos/40361283@N06/3708909019/.
Continued building the carfloat that will be fixed at the bottom right corner of the layout, representing traffic to Oakland.
It’s two pieces of .8 styrene sandwiched together (we wanted the line between), with rails gorillaglued on:
Had the cleats & bitts from Seaport Model Works http://seaportmodelworks.com/index.php?cPath=35_37.
The round hatches are tabs off of Grandt Line NBW sprues.
The rails protrude because we’ll join those up to the carfloat-approach turnout, then we’ll cut the gap when everything’s set to ensure alignment.
Gave it a once over with some Grimy Black and a “mist” of Scalecoat “Graphite” for just a hint of metal:
Wow.
It’s been a minute since the last post.
Craziness of school starting and all, I guess.
Finished weathering the carfloat:
Drybrushed some light grey, brush some glue & put some gravel & coal droppings, drizzled some “Big Jug O’ Stain” on there, and then powdered it up nice & good.
Might have gone a little overboard with the gravel & cinders. Oh well.
After this photo shoot, I didn’t want to get the powder everywhere, so I sprayed it with Dullcote.
Then I remembered that Dullcote makes powder vanish.
Oh, well.
After it dries, I’ll see what it looks like. Worse comes to worse I work the M.C. magic again with powders.
If anyone has any groovy carfloat weathering tips, I’d be happy to hear them!
Also got the float apron made & almost installed, so tomorrow, after a quick trip to the LHS, I should have picts of an almost finished carfloat scene (and thus all track installed).
MC, I’m a n00b here, other than lurking for a while here & there, but the past couple of days I’ve seen a lot of posts on a couple of your projects.
Wow!
Thank you for posting this particular project, because it is almost exactly what I want to set up, just with a different rail line, scene, etc.
It’s really cool how you get your daughter very involved with your projects, including the soldering and building turnouts. I’m looking forward to getting my sons involved with my future projects.
Keep up the good work and keep giving us progress shots!
Finally got the carfloat & apron installed, water effects and some basic ground cover done.
Following some advice by David K. Smith, we ended up screwing the float to the layout to ensure rail alignment.
Still need to add some more details: ropes, more weathering on deck, dockside details, etc.
But it’s nice to have the track 100% done, along with our staging / connection to the off-layout world.
CA’ed the black styrene backing to the backdrop, and then CA’ed the cannery to the backing:
(The window shades were “fun” to paint too dang if it isn’t hard to get a straight line! Next time I’ll try masking tape or manilla folder squares)
So here’s the long view:
It’s about 25"+ long and the docks can hold 5 cars (with 5 more on the parallel).
At the very end is a little jog in the building to help block off the end:
Just put some cinders on the roof to mimic a rough roof.
Next up:
The concrete loading dock, which will probably be made out of .06 or .08 styrene strips.
Still debating on having an awning: the original did, but we’ll see how it goes.
Thanks for looking!
Thanks, Stein.
Remember: if they work for someone else its child labor, but if they work for you its “quality family time”
Did a bunch of work to get the layout ready for a show / open house at my LHS today.
Bunch of quality SF Bay Area layouts were there in G, O, S, On3, HO and HOn3, but I was the only “Normal” scale dude there.
Put a building front on the back of the control box, where 99% of viewers will never see it:
Experimented with an ad poster, printed on regular paper, sanded thin & attached with diluted Modge Podge matte.
Sticks alright, but I should have sanded it a bit thinner.
Needed a 1/4 car to stick out of Doolittle Freight warehouse, so I sacrificed a Baby (-food car).
This is what happens when you calculate the correct angle but cut the incorrect direction:
Easily fixed.
Here’s an overview of the left side of the layout:
Got the concrete dock in for the cannery, with Gold Metal industrial stairs at each end.
Weathered the road a bit.
Installed the chainlink fence & gate with barbed wire at the Naval Air Station entrance (it’s a bit short, but will work).
Put in basic ground cover (dirt, a little fine foam of “weed” and “green blend”, some fine gravel for under the tank & around the cannery).
Put cinder “ballast” for the SP interchange line.
Mocked up Doolittle Freight with DMP walls & carstock.
Installed an SP tank (bought yesterday at Great Train Expo in Richmond) at end of Oil spur to service the engine on the neighboring track.
Installed
Been meaning to ask you about the curve at the end of the lowermost spur (with the tank made of a tank car without wheels) - that curve just looks very sharp to my (admittedly used to H0 scale) eyes - can you actually get cars to couple automaticall at the end of that spur?
But that’s a minor detail - the layout a whole looks great.
Stein: the bend at the end of the oil refinery spur is a wee bit sharp, but the photo does make it appear a lot sharper than it is.
There’s also more space at the end than it looks:
There’s room for the trucks of the next car to swing over and mate up straight.
And if the coupler is slightly off, I have no problem taking my bamboo skewer and pushing the coupler into place, just like real life on the rails.
[By “real life” I mean hand-assisted coupling: real railroads tried using enormous bamboo skewers for uncoupling work but found them a bit awkward to store when not in use, not to mention the splinter issues that dominated labor talks ]
dang if it isn’t hard to get a straight line! Next time I’ll try masking tape or manilla folder squares)
