Been doing a little work here and there on the layout during these summer months.  Finally starting to cool down in the garage so I’ll hopefully be getting in there more often as fall/winter approach.

Mostly I’ve got the fascia installed, painted and cut.  Also put some LED lighting at each yard throat.  I’m also finally stopped for more insulation foam to complete terrain building.  Got the corner sections in the work and in process of installing the last braces for the center island.

I also played with using weed fabric as a cheap fabric skirt.  It looks good when installed but it’s kinda stiff so getting to things (like tools) under the benchwork was a pain.  So I took it down for now.  You can see a piece still installed in the 2nd photo.

Shaun General

Decided to swap out the searchlights for the signal bridge as originally planned.

The bridge is a N.J. International kit built with searchlights by Richard at Custom Signal Systems.

Shaun Scenery

After having the garage looked at, no structural damage was found. Yay!

So it was time to bring the modules back in and put them back together. Eek!  Luckily everything worked as planned except for one piece of track.  It was a curve that bridged two modules. I re-laid the section of track using rail joiners at the module break so hopefully next time it comes apart it’ll go back together nicely.

For the bus wiring I switched from the previously used Anderson Powerpoles to crimp bullet connectors and labeled wires for the connections between modules.  Much cheaper and much faster/easier to assemble.

After the layout was back together I decided it was time to fill  in the “blue foam hill”.  I used cardboard strips to fill in the empty spaces, then covered the whole thing in masking tape and painted.  I ran out of tape so I still have a little to do.

And while I had the paint out I also gave the plywood top a coating. Looks much better than seeing all that bare plywood.  Got about half the layout done so far.

Shaun Benchwork, Scenery

Back in October 2010 I posted about an issue with our (rented) house with the foundation sinking/shifting in the area under the garage.  Well, in these past 4-5 weeks it’s come back with a vengeance with walls cracking, tiles popping up, doors jamming, and more.

Yesterday our landlord came out to fix and square our front door so we could open and close it properly.  Next week though we wants to take a look at one the 2×6 beams in the garage that’s become about 10 degrees off from vertical too just how far things have moved.  The front door for example had a 2 inch gap between the door frame and the house frame at the top of the frame.  It shifted that much!

So to give him access to the corner of the garage the 3 modules on the right side of the layout have come out.

One module is in the garage while the other two are in the guest bedroom.

Depending on what will be required to fix the slab and the crooked walls, the whole layout may need to come out.  So I’m just gonna prep up the wiring between modules, remove the trains in staging, remove buildings, etc… and prepare for a layout evac at this point. Which is gonna suck cause the modules were made to go from garage to moving truck to eventually a new house garage, not through through the living room door and down a narrow hallway to the guest room.

Shaun General