Let there be light!

Today my order for lights for the upper level arrived. I am various sized T4 fluorescents with 6400K “daylight” bulbs. Man, what a difference they daylight bulbs make over “cool white”.

Here’s some before/after pics (no light/light). Pics really don’t show how well they really look but I’m pretty impressed.

And the total watts/Amps draw by the lights for one level:

Level 2 completed.

After getting the trim coil up on the top level and the top benchwork on, I gave the coil a nice coating of Kilz and then painted on “Skyline” colored paint from Ace.

Here’s a panoramic shot of the room too:

This weekend I managed to get level 1 (the lower level) completed.

I drilled two holes into each bracket for cable routing, and went ahead and ran the DCC bus cable while I had the decking off. I then secured the the benchwork top with 2-4 screws per backet depending on location.

Then it was time to add the supports for the backdrop, which is aluminum trim coil. I picked up some 2″x48″ pieces of wood strip from lowe’s and cut them down to 10″ pieces. Then using Heavy Duty Liquid Nails, I glued the wood strips straight to the exposed bracket.

Next up, the trim coil. This is was just a matter of puting more liquid nails on the wood strip, pushing up the trim coil and moving to the next one. I used some staples from a staple gun a some spots to hold the trim coil in place, like the corners.

I had to break and cut the coil and one spot cause it was angling up and creating a bulge. I glued the two pieces together and will eventually use some caulking probably to blend the seems. Shouldn’t be visible to much.

Trimmed out the area for the bracket to go in.

and voila! An (almost) seemless brackdrop running around the whole level.

Just an update on the shelves. On Friday I got all the 2×2x15 braces attached to each bracket. Just need to drill a hole in 40 of them for cable running.

The very top shelf I am using I think 3/8″ Luan plywood. It only need to act as a “sky” so I didn’t go with anything fancy for that level.

Today I then visited Lowe’s and picked up 2 4×8 sheets of 15/32″ specialty plywood. I had them cut it to 6 15″x8′ sheets to limit the number of cut’s I’d need to do at home…. and to fit it all in the car! 8′ just fits in the Mazda 3 5-dr if you ever wondered

My order of 2×2x18 wood stakes arrived at Ace today, so I ran over to pick ‘em up as soon I got home from work. Made a little “assembly line” in the garage and in 4 passes cut the tip off all ‘em to make a 2×2x15 wood brace. Each of these will be attached to a shelf bracket, plywood on top, and then 1″ blue foam.

Another idea popped into my head while looking at the layout and trying to figure out how to turn trays and simulate thru-trains, etc…

I first thought about using a staging cart. Basically a little I could roll out from under the layout, raise up to level height and roll trains on and off. But figuring out how to raise the tracks that high for level 1 and 2 seemed like a pain. Then the idea of a caddy/tray hit me.

So here’s my thoughts. On level 1 I would remove the yard ladder totally. It’s place I would put 2 arrival/departure tracks simulating the tail end of the yard the train is approaching. Under each track (2 yards and 1 main) I would cut of a 1″ deep channel into the blue foam that will be on top the 1/4″ plywood (or 1/2″ haven’t decided yet). Length would be about 40-50″, width maybe 1″ or 2″. I’ll have to tinker with real stuff to determine that. In each channel I would then place a piece of 1″x?”plywood with track attached.

I now have a removable “staging tray” for trains. This would allow to me turn trains around such as an Amtrak train, and simulate the train entering the yard and leaving layout without having to use up real estate for another yard. One of these is enough for me and the budget, heh.

I would do the same for level 2, just had a straight section behind the refinery for the tray piece to remove trains that are continuing on past the refinery to whereever they are headed.

I really like this idea and it’ll be a snap to implement. Here’s a really crappy drawing I made on a post-it note

Howdy all,

Been a while since my last update, but mostly cause not much has happened. Finally got all the shelf standards installed, and brackets up. I’m in process of mounting a 2×2x15 piece of wood to each bracket. This will help for support of the top plywood, make mounting that easier, give me place to drill hole or two for cables, and give me a little for under benchwork electronics.

Today I picked up some 1/4″ plywood from lowes to start seeing how the top bencwork will look.

Well, I ran into one of these “It looks better on paper than in real life moments.”

It’s the turn-around on the bottom of the layout. The two levels of 36″ deep shelving just isn’t going to work as I hoped. It’s too deep for the shelf brackets, the top level seems to swallow up the lower, and it just doesn’t look good.

So now I’m trying to figure out what to do. The obvious solution is to just do a point to point layout.

I’m thinking of putting small yard at each level’s end now to simulate the deliver of freight from one city to the next.

The “mountain pass” area with remain on the lower level but only on the north wall, with staging behind.

The west wall would then be turned into the 2nd yard.

One crazy idea could to swap the office doors to swing outward into the front room and build two removable bridge to span the doors and then just run a small maybe 5″ deep section along that east wall back to helix. If I wanted to keep the option to run continuously.

Hmm… What to do…

Here’s a rough sketch of how I’m thinking the layout will go.

1/2 playwood will be secured directly to brackets at 16″ spacing. This should provide adequate support and prevent and sagging from occurring. At most, only 4″of plywood will overhang a bracket, so that shouldn’t pose a problem either.

Staging got dropped a lot, giving me about 7-9″ of clearance under the main level. I’m not sure how long the front valance will be either, but I drew it in as 12″. this would probably be secured using glue and “L” brackets attached to the underside of the mainlevel.

Or rather, longer standards.

After playing around with design methods for the benchwork, and to give adequate clearance between the main level and the staging, as well as a decent viewing size for the main level I’ve decided I need longer standards. So 25 more 16.5″ standards and joiners will be ordered soon. This will give me 33″ of standard to play with. More than enough to make everything happy.

My 25 standards arrived the other day and I got a few on the wall so far.

Layout height will be about 50-55″, so it’ll be at eyelevel. Staging (lower black bracket) has just enough clearance to reside under the main level. Main level will have 10 inches of space between levels (8″ to bottom of upper shelf bracket).

At first I thought it may not be a lot of room, but 10″ in n-scale should actually be a good spacing. Plus it saves me from having to make them hills/mountains really tall

I’m sure it’ll all work out in the end, I hope.