With all but one small section of the upper deck installed, I started laying out the mainline. I’m currently trying out a few different ideas on placement of industry buildings. Shuffling a few things around to accommodate clearances for turnouts (lower deck, cross beams, etc..).

I also decided I wanted to re-use my double track truss from the old layout. Instead of water underneath, I think I’m going to model a small roadway under it, but make it look like it may have been an old right-of-way with an old boarded up tunnel or something. Just an idea to try out for something different.

Shaun Scenery, Track

With winter and a cold garage in full affect these past few weeks, I haven’t done much work on the layout. I did manage to get in there while we had some warm days to start roughing out the mainline on the upper deck over staging.

Still need to pick up 3 or 4 more 2×4 sheets to complete the upper deck base and then permanently install before any track goes down.

I also managed to install a temp loop so I can run trains up out of staging and then right back down through Dixie Curve. You can kinda see the temp track in the upper right of that photo.  This has been a good way to test different trains on the staging ladders and the soon-to-be-covered track/module breaks.  So far everything has been running 100%.

Shaun Benchwork, Track

Got the mainline installed around the end of the island at (the currently named) Dixie Curve.

Shaun Track

Ok, no bears.

So at the beginning of the week I started to do a little cleanup on my layout wiring.  When I first ran the wiring for the servo turnouts and control panel, I ran the wire along with the bus wire.  I then had the thought that if/when I need to move this layout, having to remove all that wire (plus signal and more turnout wiring) would be a pain.  So I decided to pull it all out, bundle it in some split loom and run under the layout attached to the legs.  This way the whole bundle of wire can easily come off the layout by cutting some zip-ties.  Just some little prep-work for the future.

I also decided to relocate the BDL168 board and command station to a new location under the island.  The location I originally had these ended up not being very accessible and the wiring started to get messy. Now everything is nice and tidy.  I left room for a 2nd BDL168 board to be installed in the near future.  Turnout and signal hardware will mount under the island in similiar fashion as well.

The black bundle you see is the LED Occupancy wire running to the control panel. It connects to the 4 tan phone jack boxes, which are wired to the the BDL168 via the rainbow ribbon cable.

Once my re-wiring project was done, it was time to get back to the track.

I started to laying down the roadbed for the island this weekend, the first bit of viewable mainline to go down.  I wanted my mainline on the island to have a high ballast profile and have some height difference from the siding, so I doubled up on the cork roadbed.

I use Midwest Cork for my roadbed. It comes in a strip you need to pull apart to get your two halves, so you always end up with one piece having a nice profile and one piece almost square (until you sand off the extra bits).

So what I did for the mainline was use all the nicely profiled edges for the bottom layer and the ugly squarish piece for the upper layer because it’s gonna get trimmed.  I then laid out my track, traced the tie edge on the cork, and then used a carpet cutter to trim the cork using the bottom layer as kind of a guide.

And here’s a view showing the height difference between the mainline and the siding.

Once the roadbed was down, I started adding the super-elevation using the masking tape method.

Shaun DCC, Track