Batting Cleanup
The Itch That I Had to Scratch
If you look closely at the various photos across all the posts for this project, it will become clear that the story is not being told in a completely chronological order. Details in the photos reveal that there have been changes taking place that are not discussed in the given post. Sometimes they get addressed later, sometimes they don’t.
There is one detail I want to address, the story of the disappearing ceiling. This one will be quite obvious when you see the walkthrough photos later in this post.
When we purchased this house 20+ years ago, this room was allocated as my train room and I immediately started planning different railroads to fill the space. Eventually I settled on a plan that is very close to what I am building now.
This was about 15 years ago and at the time I felt that fluorescent lights would give me the light I wanted so I set about figuring out how to get the lights installed in the best location possible. I wanted the fluorescents for general room and layout lighting. Additionally, at the time I liked the idea of using colored lights to simulate evening/dawn and using blue lights for subtle “night” lighting. A new technology called Light Rope had just come out and made this relatively easy to do. Given that model building is my favorite part of the hobby, I also wanted to install some track lights so I could use spotlights to focus light on specific scenes.
My train room has two levels of ceiling. When you walk in, the first 1/3 of the ceiling is standard height then as you get farther in, the last 2/3 are vaulted. For even lighting around the whole room, the two levels were problematic and the vaulted portion even more so when it came to mounting things. I decided to hang a suspended ceiling in the room to give me a uniform, level playing field. I planned on customizing the grid layout so I could easily hang fluorescent fixtures to be positioned directly over sections of the layout, following the proposed track plan. There would also be sections where the colored lights would be exposed and the final touch being the addition of the tracks for the track lighting sections.
Here's a shot of peninsula (pre lighting upgrade) that also shows some of the ceiling in question
Overall it worked pretty well and I had lights in exactly the locations I wanted them. However, there was one dark secret…
Building code (and common sense) dictates that every room that can potentially be a bedroom upstairs requires a smoke detector. I have no problem with that and maintain the smoke detectors throughout my house. It’s just that smoke detectors need to be installed in the highest point in a room and the vaulted ceiling in this room made access to that detector, shall we say, problematic. And this just got worse after I added the suspended ceiling.
Even though they are wired to the household electrical, each detector still has a backup battery that needs changed every year. Every year, when it came time to change batteries, I cursed that thing. And you could not ignore it because when the batteries get low, they start chirping at you every 5 minutes. At 3:00 AM that get annoying.
I am a bit embarrassed to admit that eventually I got so tired of that specific unit that one year I took it down to change the battery and it never found its way back up. I had operational detectors in every other room in the house, so I decided to stop doing battle with this one.
Well, I am the type of person who worries about this kind of thing and every time I walked in that room the first thing I would think about is, “I really should put that smoke detector back up.” It was an itch that I couldn’t scratch…
Years later, as we started this latest version of the project, this was on my mind – daily. I broached the topic of removing the suspended ceiling with my partner on this project when we were about halfway through installing benchwork. The new layout plan was all self-contained. The lighting was already taken care of and the ceiling was no longer needed. In fairness to him, I did not share “The Great Smoke Detector Incident” with him as part of my motivation. We discussed it with the conclusion being that the ceiling wasn’t in the way and was not hurting anything so why bother. It would be better to focus on getting the railroad up and running. So, I left the ceiling in place.
Fast forward to September 2020. My friend had just gone to AZ. The benchwork was basically complete and the lighting installation well underway. I reached my breaking point one Saturday morning. I walked into the train room that morning intending to work on lights, looked up at the ceiling and said, “This thing is outta here.” Reached up and immediately started removing ceiling panels. No plan. Took the Nike approach and “Just did it.”
This is partway through the removal. Notice the smoke detector mounting plate in the upper right – the itch is about to get scratched.
It ended up taking a day to get it all out of there. Yes, it would have been much easier to do it BEFORE the benchwork was up. Sometimes I just do things the hard way – it’s part of my process.
I now own an extension ladder. The detector is reachable with the ladder placed right next to the peninsula so I am expecting this to be less of an issue going forward.
A pain in the butt but well worth the effort. I hadn’t realized how much that was on my mind until it was gone. Also, walking into the train room now the room feels a lot bigger and more open.
Now that the track lighting is all gone, I would like to remove that large transformer but not sure how I am going to do that. It is quite heavy and mounted directly over the center of the peninsula. There is no way I can hold on to it while removing the screws and safely lift it out of there while leaning that far off the side of a ladder. For now, it is staying put.
End Caps
While the benchwork runs around the entire room, there are two points where it ends and I want to add end caps to properly terminate the scenery. The door slabs on the shelf brackets are quite solid. Adding an end cap to tie the ends of the two decks together will add even more stability.
At the door where you walk into the train room, I want an end cap on the benchwork along the wall to cleanly end the scenery at the doorway (red arrow). The other “end” of the railroad is along the right-hand wall where it approaches the helix (blue arrow). This is the end of the line on the island portion of the track plan (upper deck), so I want an end cap there to end the scenery as well.
So what is an end cap? It is a sheet of 3/4" plywood that covers the entire end of both decks of the layout.
I used a sheet of 3/4" plywood cut to be flush against the back wall and the width contoured along the front edge to fill out to the lighting valance at the top and then come down just inside the track right-of-way of both decks. The height goes from the bottom edge of the lower deck fascia to the top edge of the upper lighting valance.
A leg was bolted on to ensure that the corner was fully supported. When operational, removable staging cartridges will be connecting to both decks at this location. Therefore, I want the extra stability. It looks a little rough and heavy. This will be mostly hidden once the curtain is installed around the lower deck of the layout.
I was originally planning on running the end cap all the way to the floor for the support but reaching under the layout to get at the light switch was inconvenient. It is much easier to reach in from the end so added the leg instead.
The whole thing was painted flat black and then it was mounted by driving screws through the end cap into 1”x2” cleats glued across the underside of the door slab ends on each deck. The cleats provided a much more solid foundation for the screws than the soft material used for the door slab frames. Another 1”x2” cleat was added across the inside top edge and screws were driven up through the ceiling panel into the cleat. A couple more screws through the top corner of the end cap into the end of the lighting valance L-girder and the end cap was attached. This ties all three levels together and adds more stability to the whole assembly, top to bottom.
The Other End
While all traffic enters and leaves the layout at this end near the doorway, the other “end” of the layout is the upper deck, near the helix in the opposite corner of the room. The upper deck on the peninsula, across the closet and up the right wall, represents trackage on the island. Once it reaches the corner near the helix, that is the end of the line on the island.
On the lower deck at that location, one track exits the helix and the branch line proceeds down the wall and around the peninsula to the harbor.
The end cap on this end provides a scenery block on the upper deck and supports the tunnel portal on the lower deck. Since there would not be any extra activity here (like staging) I did not see the need for a leg.
Once again 1”x2” cleats were added across the bottom of the door slabs for a stronger anchor point for the mounting screws. You can also see the cleat added across the top for securing the top edge to the ceiling panels. For the bottom deck a hole was cut to allow the track from the helix access to the lower deck.
Mirrors
With the end caps in place, the next step is to install mirrors. This layout has a number of inside corners and those are ideal locations to use mirrors to make the scenes appear deeper. The two end caps that were just installed also provide ideal surfaces, perpendicular to the benchwork ends, for mounting mirrors that will extend the visual ends of the layout.
There are 4 locations that I plan to extend with 6 mirrors.
Location #1
On the upper deck, just inside the door, the main industry is going to be a cement plant. Cement plants typically use huge amounts of raw materials (especially limestone). Due to limited layout space, rarely can the large quantity of raw materials be modeled in a way that represents the amount usually on hand. The plan here is to mount a mirror on the inside surface of the end cap and model some of the piles of raw materials up against the mirrors. This will make appear twice as large without using any additional layout real estate.
In a similar fashion, on the lower deck, there will be a quarry operation. This is another type of feature that is difficult to model anywhere near a true scale size. Modeling the quarry up against a mirror on the lower deck will allow me to visually double the size without sacrificing benchwork space.
Location #2
On the upper deck, the corner to the left of the window is another location ideal for a mirror. The industry in that corner is going to be a steel mill that runs up the last third of the left wall, into the corner. The mill has a number of long buildings. By running them along the wall and into the mirror I can double the size to more accurately represent the true scale of the large buildings that typically make up a steel mill.
Location #3
Where the upper deck ends at the helix on the right wall, represents the end of the line for the trackage on the island. The planned industry for this location is a marine salvage operation. The mirror here will allow me to double the number of derelict ships being scrapped without sacrificing physical real estate.
Location #4
The last location is back in the corner where the peninsula attaches to the short section of closet wall sticking out into the room. On the right side of the peninsula, the track runs down the right side and then makes a broad U-turn across the closet area and turns back up the right-hand wall. Due to the curved nature and deep (hard to reach) corners, I see this as a good location for two small towns. The emphasis will be on structures and scenery rather than switching locations. The inside corners formed where the peninsula connects to the wall on both decks is perfect for mirrors. This will allow the towns to appear larger.
Valance
For the most part the lighting valance is complete. There are three areas remaining:
- The valance needs to be completed over the harbor area.
- There is a gap between the panel across the window and panel along the right wall, over the helix.
- There is a gap to the left of the section across the window that needs a 45-degree filler panel.
The harbor area requires special benchwork, lighting, electrical, fascias, and valance. That work will be done as a project unto itself at a later date.
I need to finalize how the trackwork will exit the helix onto the lower deck module that crosses the window. Once that is figured out, I can then work out how I will wall off the visible portion of the helix. Filling the gap in the valance above the helix will be part of walling off the helix.
That leaves the gap in the valance panels to the left of the window.
In order to match the lines of the benchwork below, this gap needed a short section of valence panel to extend the section parallel to the window and then a short 45-degree section to fill the remainder of the corner. I have been trying to maintain a fairly uniform spacing on the black bolts used in the valence panels. The spacing worked out such that there would be no bolts in this corner. This meant that I needed to come up with some way to attach the filler pieces without bolts.
I opted for mounting the filler pieces to a notched block where the notches would allow the block to slip down over the L-girder section used to support the valence. The two bare boards you see in the photo above just above the lights are the front webbing of the valence L-girder. The mounting block for the filler panels needs to slip down over these. The block ended up like so:
Slipping it into place gives you this. I need to add some fillers in the back to block the light in the cracks. I’ll do this before I paint all the valance panels. I am going to hold off painting until Spring, when the weather warms up because I want to do the painting outside.
Cleanup
This step was needed before I could start any trackwork. For those of you who have been reading all of my project posts. You can see many examples of the chaos of layout construction with stuff piled everywhere. Now that the main room prep and benchwork was complete, I wanted to clean everything off the benchwork and thoroughly clean as much as possible.
I spent two evenings cleaning up, throwing out, and organizing. I swept the room out and then took a vacuum cleaner to all the benchwork. When you start laying track, it is a good idea to keep things as clean as possible. Even the tiniest granules caught under track or roadbed cause humps and bumps. The smaller the scale you work in, the worse the resulting problems can be.
In the end, I was standing in the room with two decks of well-lit benchwork running all the way around the room, complete with fascias and a lighting valance. It gave me a great sense of accomplishment. And I want to shout out to my friend Bob McLean who was the original inspiration for this project and who contributed a huge amount of time, effort, and resources to this project. I feel like this is as much his project as mine. As a side note, Bob now lives full-time in AZ but we have started talking about a shelf layout for his new garage. That is how this all started the first time…
Walkthrough
Throughout all my previous posts, the photos show bits and pieces of the railroad. You get glimpses of various features but not really a comprehensive view of the whole thing. I wanted to show a few photos to help folks see the whole thing. Here is a drawing of the whole railroad to give you a starting point followed by a photographic walkthrough of the current state of the project.
Standing at door you see this. Staging will attach to each deck on the left, the metal brackets you see on the right are where the harbor will eventually be built. The mainland harbor on the lower deck and the island harbor on the upper deck.
Stepping into the room, walking halfway down the length of the peninsula you see this:
Starting to turn the corner around the end of the peninsula you are looking at the window modules and the helix starts to come into view.
At the end of the peninsula you are looking directly at the helix. It is located in the corner opposite the door into the train room.
As you continue around the end of the peninsula the closet area starts to come into view.
The closet area is the future site of two seaside towns.
If you turn around here and look back towards the helix, you see the end of the upper deck on the right side. The future site of the marine salvage yard. You also see the track from the helix entering the lower deck. This is the branch line heading towards the mainland harbor.
If you walk back around the peninsula on your way back to the entry door, on the right side you see the futre site of the cement plant on the upper deck and the quarry on the lower deck.
I am excited to get started on the next phase: track planning and track laying. I have a general idea of how things will flow across the layout but I have only started detailed track planning for the upper deck along the left wall inside the door. I also have the main yard design ready. I’ll likely start laying track for that first and then work out from there.
Thank you for following along and I appreciate folks taking the time to read and leave comments. I hope readers are finding this helpful – or at least a good distraction from the current state of the things.
