The basics

The most basic thing of all, I suppose, was finishing the basement in our new house where the layout is being built. But I'll save that for my carpentry and drywalling blog. Suffice it to say that I pity anyone who looks to me for drywall-mudding advice. The space turned out adequate and relatively attractive, as long as you don't look too closely.

The benchwork was constructed as cheaply as possible. No apologies for that. For 1X4s, I bought a sheet of 3/4" plywood and ripped it into about 13 strips. I raided a dumpster at a local mall and got a ton of 2X4s, and also used those left over from the basement framing. OK, I bought a few too.

I also bought some long drywall screws and some bolts and tee-nuts to put in the bottoms of my table legs and make them height-adjustable.

The rest of the hardware was pretty much leftovers from my hardware box -- I knew I was keeping all that old stuff for something.

Pink foam was the expensive part, and I needed (and still need) quite a bit of it. 2" thick sheets are $24 at Home Depot; 1" sheets are $11.

But then the gods of model railroading stepped in. As I was driving along Electric Road here in mountainous Roanoke, I saw it out of the corner of my eye:

That unmistakeable shade of pink.

In a dumpster. Lots of it.

Turns out there is this company that builds modular pieces of buildings or some such, and fills a dumpster a week with scraps. So having spent about $60 on sheets of the stuff, I will need to spend no more. I don't regret the bought sheets; I needed some really clean and seamless ones. But it sure is nice to have unlimited mountain-building material!

I have all the track-level foam down on the tables at this point, and will be building all elevations above that after I have transcribed the track plan onto the foam. And by the way, here is THE BIG TRACK PLAN, finally: