After a long time, the work on the new layout finally began almost a year ago.
The shape of the layout is roughly a W. The sides are going up the entire length of the walls. One side will have a turnaround, the other will contain a helix to connect the top layer to a lower storage layer. The middle part extends more than halfway into the room.
Instead of building a big contiguous piece of benchwork, I decided to build individual segments, the same way I built the pieces of my old layout. The rationale for this is that if we ever have to take the layout apart, for any reason, it will be easier to do this way, and we may be able to preserve the track and all without major damage. The middle piece consists of two segments measuring 1800x1200mm, the sides are made up of several segments which are 600mm and 800mm wide and a maximum of 2400mm long. The ends, which have yet to be built, will stand out at 1200mm from the walls.
The materials are the same as before, painted MDF, dressed pine for the frame, and 70x35mm pine studs for the legs. The segments are joined together with bolts and wingnuts. During the assembly, an adjustable office desk on wheels came in very handy – I used it to move the pieces in place and adjust the table height before attaching the legs, to ensure that the tops would be at the same height. At times, this was akin to a physical form of Tetris, where the pieces had to be moved into place carefully so as not to damage the walls or get stuck against other bits.
The below photos show the benchwork advancing over a few weeks. By now, the benchwork is complete, and a fair amount of track has been laid, wired up, and tweaked. They say that no track plan survives contact with the baseboard, and that has been the case here – some changes had to be made, and I will need to move a section along the baseboard by a few cm because the points are sitting right atop a crossframe, which will make installing point motors impossible. But that’s all going to be subject of another post.
