The New Staging Level
August 1st, 2009
Made great progress this weekend getting the new staging level installed. Spent most of Friday (My off-Friday, yay) installing the benchwork supports and plywood, and then today getting all of the track down. I’m short one right hand turnout after buying everything the LHS had.
What’s left to do is attach some corner pieces where the track is overhanging the edge, wire wire up a bus under the layout and tie in the feeders and reverse loop circuit, install the new lift bridge, and get the loop area hidden behind a new fascia.
I have been following your progress for a while now. It looks great but one concern – is the gap on top of the lower staging level too low? I know its N scale but access still seems a bit tight.
Top of the staging level to the bottom of the lower deck fascia is about 3″. Just enough space to get your hands in to work on the track.
Since I’m not really planning on doing much operations or holding operating sessions and the like, my staging is simply a “parking lot” for setup unit trains I’ll run through the layout. So I wasn’t really concerned about needing to have enough space to hands into the staging level when it’s full of trains.
Looks good–you should be OK on clearance and maintenance should be minimal with the Unitrack (or is that True Track?)
Yup, it’s all Unitrack.
I like the black painted surface. Something other then plywood, but not prototypical. sort of helps the staging fade away below the layout.
Have you run it yet?
Yeah, I wanted to try and blind it in to the rest of layout for now. Haven’t quite decided if I want to extend the fascia down more to hide it the level yet. I would cut out a few access holes if I did do that.
Yesterday I did wire up a feeder to the entry track and managed to run a SD70ACe with an autorack through a yard track and around the loop with no problems. I think the unitrack locking really helps keeping connectivity going throughout the whole level even with just one feeder.