Room Preperation

Well here I go. I've loved model trains all my life but i didn't have the time or space to build a layout. In 2016 that all changed when I decided to cut my music studio in half and build a small n-scale around the wall, double decked shelf layout. Easy, right? I spent most of 2015 and the beginning of 2016 researching what I wanted to model. The ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach had always interested me and Union Pacific's Delores Yard (formally a Southern Pacific yard) is right down the street from my house as is the Alameda Corridor so i thought all that would fit nicely. I would be making a freelance layout with prototypical elements. I decided to model a port in the bottom level and some kind of rural areas on the top. I want to be able to model as many different scenes and areas as I can reasonably fit into the layout, the port to the mountains.

Here's the door to my train room. I picked these metal signs up at the "Big Train Show".



Here's the space after removing the drum kit and PA.



Carpet removal and painting (i will be using photo backdrops)





All the electrical plugs are 6 feet up the walls in this garage conversion (strange?) so I moved two of them down put them on their own circuit. I did not cut into the drywall mostly because it's too much work. I just used conduit that will be covered by the backdrop.





New Florescent lighting was added but I'm not sure if I like the look of it (the light). I'm gonna revisit lighting later.



Because my space is small (8' x 9') i needed to find a way to make my runs longer so I decided to build a second Level. Originally i was going to have a staging yard on the bottom but I scrapped that idea. However now I needed to build a Helix. Since space was limited I looked at a few different design ideas, oval, nolix and even an elevator system. eventually I decided to build it outside of the train room.

The Helix will go here, just outside of the train room.




All I would have to do is move a bit of shelving, do a little re-arranging and viola, I got a place for my helix. Turns out it's not so easy though. Putting the helix outside presented a couple of issues, the biggest being that I need to have access to the A/C unit directly above it in the rafters. Also, i felt like i need a way to monitor the traffic in the Helix (single line) and I didn't want to go to high tech with it. In other words i didn't want video monitors or motion sensors etc. More on the Helix later.

So that's my train space.

Bench work construction as well as construction of the Helix has started and I will share those updates as time permits.

Chris