Lumber baron

My antique railway baggage wagon displays the results of my labours.

It took a couple of years to get to this point. But I bought two sheets of 3/4″ plywood on Saturday, and yesterday I ripped some of that king’s ransom into framing pieces for benchwork.

Sawmill App: My track saw made short, safe work on ripping plywood into framing materials. The two white blocks to the left of the track are my spacers, to ensure each piece is the same width.

As mentioned in a previous post, it’s time to start building a layout – or, at least, a piece of one. I’ve now built enough S scale motive power for the Niagara St. Catharines & Toronto Railway that I’m confident I can do it. The next challenge is, I need to build some track under wire. This is a new venture for me. I might as well jump into the deep end.

All of my freight motors need a place to hang out, right?

My plan is to lay out a selectively compressed version of the NS&T’s carbarn and equipment storage yard on Welland Avenue in St. Catharines, on a 2×8 foot shelf. I think I can fit it in this space – but if not, I actually have enough material for two such shelves.

As I’ve written previously, my thought is that if I can do the wirework for this scene, I can do the wirework for an entire layout. And if I cannot – or I decide I really don’t like building or operating under wire – I’ll have a nice diorama to display all of my NS&T equipment while I fill the layout room with some other subject.

I’m taking an unorthodox approach to my layout planning in that I’m not doing it with pencil, graph paper, ruler, and compass. Instead of drawing the layout to scale and working from that plan, I’ll print out turnout templates and start sketching the track and structure arrangements, full-size, on kraft paper. When I’m happy with the general arrangment, I will mock up the buildings in mat board – a process that worked extremely well on my Port Rowan layout.

Once I’m happy with everything, I’ll transfer the plan to the plywood – and start building.