Starting up again - new home, second layout, Dead Rail experiment

It's been a while since I posted an entry, quite a while.  Once we decided in January 2014 that we would move this year, all work on the layout effectively ended.  Now we're in a new home in the model railroad mecca of Beamsville, ON (no, really, we have a fantastic hobby shop in town and some of the best modellers around), and work has resumed.

When we left our home, I had installed all the modules in our family room on a metal shelf bracket system and laid the track through most of Elmira.  A lighting valance hiding T5 fluorescent bulbs was also installed.  It looked very promising, as shown in this in-progress view:

However, I ran into problems with the trackwork, primarily related to the rail popping off the CV ties strips.  We'll get into that issue in another post.

We moved into a home with an unfinished basement, so naturally I was paralyzed again reconsidering how to best adapt the track plan to my new space, even my choice of prototype was up for grabs.  Over the summer I did make a set of three very lightweight modules to build a scale model of CN's Pine Street spur following an inspiration in Trevor Marshall's Achievable Layouts blog (http://themodelrailwayshow.com/LayoutDesign/?p=2070).  Three turnouts in 12 ft and I could model the mill complex in exact scale length.

I'm still undecided on whether to complete that concept, but with a Tam Valley DRS receiver and transmitter expected any day now, I can always lay the track down held together only with rail joiners and a few tacks, and operate and experiment to my heart's content.  I may still build this as something to take to shows, as Trevor suggested, if only to demonstrate the battery operation to the masses.

For now I'm putting up the drywall in the first basement room to be finished.  Nominally it will be a guest room, but practically speaking it will become the home of Elmira, ON on the CNR ca. 1988.  As it should be.  Questions abound as to layout height (I'm thinking high, i.e. 60"), room & layout lighting (LED strip vs. T5), duckunders, how much to intrude into the room space (i.e. along three walls or go for all four) and the aforementioned question of reliable track laying.  And I suppose also of whether to wire the layout for conventional DCC operation.  All things to be considered in due time.  If you have any thoughts and experiences to share regarding the above, I'd love to hear about and discuss them with you.

ttfn

Inertia is not on my side. Or, how to delay learning a new skill for a very long time.

It's amazing how long it can take to start something new.  Take for instance airbrushing.  Being shown how easy it is to spray track at the Nordel model railroad club in Hockessin, DE, I decided to finally build a booth to be able to put my Aztek to use.  I combined what I liked from the information offered by various people in the Model Railroad Hobbyist (mrhmag.com) forums and built a fair-sized booth. 

That was a year ago.  With my shelf layout's benchwork completed and a desire to paint my Central Valley tie strips prior to gluing them down, I needed to get my equipment set up and start learning to airbrush.  All that was holding me back now was fear of the unknown.  So this past weekend I positioned the booth in my basement storage room next to the window, hooked up some dryer exhaust tubing out the window, and plugged my compressor in.

And there it's sat for the last 3 days.  Not for lack of time for me to get out the Aztek and start practicing on some cardboard, but mostly due to that inertia that keeps me from trying something new until I'm 100% sure I've got all the angles covered.  I feel like I need to now do a bunch of research on airbrush techniques, and how to clean the tool properly, and which air pressures and paint-to-thinner ratios to use, etc.  You get the picture.  Manufacturing myself a to-do list to keep from starting.

Well, my plan is to just get some paint, a piece of scrap cardboard, and some Windex as thinner/cleaner, and start messing about with it on Friday, as one son has baseball games the next two nights.  Because after this airbrushing hurdle, there's several other things waiting to be tackled, including handlaying track and turnouts.  Time to get going on this layout-building thing!