For anybody who’s been following along with the South Penn RR story (my layout), its been awhile, about eight months of inactivity while I thought some stuff through. I finally got off my keaster though about a month or so ago and started re-doing the benchwork. I had ripped out most of the previous effort-- which was a really difficult decision to make, but I’m really starting to feel good about making it. The principle reason was to re-design / re-build it as a double-deck layout.
The biggest initial effort was to lower the remaining benchwork to the new height so it could become the lower deck. The lower deck benchwork is 38 inches high with the expectation that it will either be topped by 1 or 2 inch foam, or else something similar in spline and hardshell. I’m going to be using a combination of the two in various places throughout the layout. The upper deck framing is set for 58 inches. Again with the expectation of using 1 or 2 inch foam and/or spline and hardshell construction.
I tried several concepts for the upper deck before deciding for sure on using steel shelf pilasters and brackets-- which of course had been my very first design concept for the layout, go figure 
I’ve got all the upper deck brackets mounted and I’m working on adapting them to wood (I’ll do a full write-up with pictures in another couple of weeks). I still have the large center peninsula to do, along with its integrated two-loop helix, and the lightweight shelf-bracket “upper-deck only” route through the office and around the other side of the basement.
For anybody not familiar with my space, I have all of one side of the basement and the high-level of the remainder, and have negotiated a fat-but-skinny-as-I-can-make-it peninsula down the middle.You can do a search for “South Penn RR” here to find the previous threads. You can also go to “http://south-penn-rr.com” (I know, I didn’t make it a link) to see what I did before. Same space, mostly the same benchwork concept except the