July 28, 2012
Went out on Saturday to make some additional acquisitions. Another few hundred dollars later, I have some more plywood (3/4″ Birch, G2S, at Windsor Plywood for all of $30 per sheet), additional shelf standards and Brackets (found them much less expensive at Lee Valley, and they’re interchangeable with the existing stuff I bought at Home Depot) and a box of cork.
Cam and I got back to the house and after hauling it all downstairs (actually, it was brought in through the side window in the basement) and proceeded to pull up existing roadbed and track. Yes… You read that correctly. We did some checks, measurements and found we needed a little more length for the Trent River Bridge and I didn’t necessarily like having to go with partially visible 26″ radius curves… So we did what we did up one deck and curved the train behind the backdrop to hide it for a little bit and compress more mileage into hidden track. Needed to pull up one string of flex and also the roadbed underneath to make the corner.
And that’s about where we ended up finishing for the day. More work to come next weekend!
July 22,2012
Cam came over early this afternoon to help on some more progress on the benchwork for the layout. Primarily woodwork surrounding the shelf brackets on the end-wall where ICG in Nanaimo, the Trent river bridge, and the entry into Port Alberni.
And with that work, I’m now pretty much out of my 2″ strips of 3/4″ plywood. Now I really am needing virtually everything!
July 21, 2012
So I’ve been stuck for quite a while in the benchwork department, and today, we’ve made pretty decent progress!
After checking out the offerings from Rona, Lowes and Home Depot, Cam and I settled on 70″ tall white Rubbermaid dual track standards, bought 8 of them, and a couple boxes of 11.5″ brackets (32).
After a spot of lunch, Dan came over to help with the fun of installing the standards with Cam and I. Numerous screws secured the standards into the wall and we now have the ability to carry track boards half way to Courtenay, well into the Nanaimo switching zone and halfway into the Port Alberni Yard. Now I just need more of virtually everything. 🙂
July 15, 2012
Saturday, went down to see Bruce (The Dispatcher) to pick up the first of the circuit breakers for the layout, a DCC Specialties PSX-4. Lots of good reviews for this and the unit will certainly help keep the bulk of the layout running when derailments and switches being run through short out the district.
Cam came over and we worked on getting things at the Booster Shelf cleaned up and sorted out to get the circuit breaker installed. Owing to the PSX-4’s rather large size, we had to build a secondary shelf to hold the power supplies for the boosters, and that allowed lots of things to be organized.
I’ll be ordering a couple PSX-3’s to subdivide the outputs from the other two boosters shortly, and here’s how the sub-districts will work out:
| Output | 1 | 2 | 3 |
| A | Parksville | Port Alberni | Upper Helix |
| B | Bryn | Arrowsmith | Lower Helix |
| C | Courtenay | Nanaimo | Staging Yard |
| D | Mud Bay | N/A | N/A |
Here’s a picture of how it’s set up for the moment. The blue wall immediately to the right of the green circuit board (PSX-4) is where the PSX-3’s will go. Starting to look somewhat organized! Too bad I didn’t think to take a picture before we started on all this… Oh well, hindsight is 20/20, right?
July 2, 2012
Happy Canada Day!
A little belated to be sure, but I was offline (aka camping in an area without cell coverage) for the bulk of the weekend.
Came home last night festooned with mosquito bites and a few sunburnt areas and the cool basement was calling out to me. Naturally, I heeded the call, went downstairs and built a couple bullfrogs, spiked down about nine feet of track (the remainder of the main and siding at Arrowsmith) and put a few spikes into the turnout at the west end of the Arrowsmith siding. I also installed and tested the bullfrogs.
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