Building a mountain!

Saturday's build time had me making a mountain.  Tomorrow I paint it!  We've been having difficulties...Digitrax lied to us about a warranty return and exchange, so we're still without the booster and the trains we ordered that were supposed to come with DCC decoders didn't.  We are at a very frustrating point in the build but we'll hopefully be past it soon.

March 26th, 2013: Track is Done!!!

Well, the train mountain platforms are laid, the foam is all cut and placed and the track is now all set.  We have to make modifications as we delve into DCC (a whole new adventure) but my job will shortly turn to placing the landscaping in.  I built a couple of model buildings today while father played with wiring.  Tomorrow we head to the shop in Marlboro for gear and advice.  Went to the train show in Kingston on Sunday and while it was small and a little disappointing we stocked up on all the Woodland Scenics stuff we're going to need, including casts for molding hydrocal.

Here's the video:

March 12th: The Build Continues

We have pretty much completed the east and south sides of the terrain and are working into the more complex areas leading up to the mountain on the north side!

Peb. 24th: Continuing the perimeter!

Today we worked on tying the east section together with the 4X3 industrial section on the northeast side.  We have to put in a gorge with a trestle but we didn't get to that this weekend.  We put in 9 hours of work on the layout between yesterday and today and my father put in more than that on his own building houses out of balsa wood and printed patterns on thick stock paper.  We had trouble with one area by a canyon cutout on the east side...the bottom was uneven and the glue didn't overcome the foam's natural tendency to warp.  It doesn't affect our tracks any.  Today I cut a lot of ramps.  It's my least favorite thing to do with the hot wire scroll table because it requires far more precision than my shaky hands can provide and thinking about it while doing it makes it that much worse.  We are getting really good at cutting out smaller pieces and fitting everything together just so but the next phase of the build is going to be the most challenging so far...several tracks crossing over each other at different heights.  This is going to look amazing when it's done, though!!!!  It's already far more complex than I could have hoped for and that's a good thing!!!

Check out this annotated video of our progress to this point:

Feb 17th: Laying foam!

We spent several hours today dabbling in the basement.  We are definitely getting better at doing the foam.  We did the edging of the terrain on the east side of the setup and glued the foam down there.  Then we moved on to the 4X3 area, laying foam and cutting ramps and eventually gluing all that down, too.  We used soup and tomato cans as weight to hold the foam as the glue dried.  We used 2:3's to hold down the ramp areas.  We also made an elevation adjustment to the mountain table.

The tracks are laid and so are our plans...

Last weekend we started laying down foam for the terrain.  It's been an interesting exercise in engineering and materials science.  We have actually gotten farther along than this but I want to wait until this weekend is over before posting the next video.  It's pretty startling what you can accomplish with a hot wire scroll table!  Next challenge...the mountain.  It's going to be interesting!

What this all looked like before...

...the massive train setup we have finished was conceived!

A swimming pool with a swimmer in it!!!  Does the paneling on the side look familiar?  It should!  We reused this for our build!

The paneling on this side was actually framed out with 2X4's and is now the control panel side of our build!

The pool table is still there.  There is plenty of room for playing even with the behemoth train table set up!