I'm Back

So it's been more than a year since I've posted anything here. And much longer since I've been able to take time to work on the railroad.

After the fall of 2010, things got stuck. Mostly because the volume of my work (I'm self-employed) grew to an extraordinary degree, but also because of a wide range of personal distractions involving day-to-day life.

I think, too, however, that I was sort of stuck because of a nagging dissatisfaction with the track plan that I was once so committed to.

And then the basement, and the workbench, started getting more and more cluttered... and time passed... and more time... and more time...

Until, finally, I could stand it no longer. I had to get back on track. So earlier this spring I spent a couple of days decluttering the work bench, cleaning up the basement, turning my train tables back into places where I could lay some track instead of auxiliary horizontal storage surfaces.

I got out my 17 x 24 inch pad of graph paper and bought a piece of foamcore board to use as an inexpensive drawing board. I carefully outlined the sectional set up as configured for the trackplan I had settled on way back three years (three years!) ago.

And almost immediately, as I was planning out some track, I found myself once again feeling a nagging frustration. Look, it was a nifty plan, really, but there are some grades and runs on it that just don't seem like they would work. The space on it was really tight. (Of course, that's why I picked it.)

This has happened before over the last few years, as I had buyer's remorse of sorts over the plan I'd picked, and for which I had already built four sections of benchwork. I tried more than once to rearrange them to see if I could make something else work, with no luck.

But then I had a brainstorm just a few weeks ago. I don't know why I hadn't figured this out before. But I hadn't.

I came up with a completely different way to set up the sections.

I later tweaked it a little bit more, to better deal with the space I am in in the basement. and after a few more tweaks, bingo!

And the new track plan I've devised, while taking some inspiration from the original I was considering, has so many more advantages. It's able to create a longer run, and at the same time it is going to be able to make much more gradual grades. And the whole thing just fits better in that basement, in every respect. Not only that, but while I am keeping the retractable casters I devised for two of the four sections, I don't anticipate needing to use them much at all. For most purposes, the layout can be fixed in place almost all the time. Access to a storage closet, which I thought we would lose, has been restored completely. And DairyStateMom has plenty of room to reach the two big bookcases (which we did move across the basement from where they were when the framework pictures were taken back in the fall of 2010).

I will post some drawings tomorrow or the next day showing the original sectional arrangement and the way it has evolved. In the meantime, I am raring to go once again. And this time, I have no reservations.