Construction continues on the new railroad. Albeit slow.
I'm now working on the railroad on Monday evenings and having work sessions on Thursday evenings. Progress lately has been hampered by not having a pickup to haul plywood and drywall. That's a long story, but should be remedied in upcoming months. In the mean time, I'll battle with putting drywall and plywood in our Suburban. And try not to gouge up the interior.
In my last post, I complained about the quality of plywood at the big box stores. It hasn't gotten any better, but the price of materials has really gone up. 1/2" c/d plywood is nearing $40 a sheet. And drywall is nearly $12 a sheet. Just kind of surprising how fast prices are going up.
I completed the super structure for the egress point. Risers have been added.
The plywood dilemma hit as I finished the small peninsula. I did not have the plywood to continue the end of the peninsula. Also, to the right will be plywood underneath as it will tie into the mail peninsula to the right.
We got rolling on the drywall installation and finished the west wall (left) and onto the egress point. Unfortunately, in my haste to get it all installed, I forgot to install a corner plywood backing (left and out of the picture). Normally, this wouldn't be an issue, but the risers were all lower to compensate for the thickness of the plywood. Why wasn't it already in place? It had developed a nasty warp. In order to install it, I would need to take the warp out, or at least minimize that. I wet the plywood and left it in the sun with weights to flatten it out. After two tries, it was pretty good. However, that was down in the garage when we were doing the work and oops!...
I was able to remove the section of drywall where the plywood should be. Fortunately, I can cut it with utility knife and remove it. It took adding a splice plate, but it worked out wl..
Fortunately, the liquid nails peeled away easily from the paper backing on the drywall. I was able to easily scrape it off of the risers too. However, as you can see below, gluing verticals to OSB horizontals isn't the most reliable practice. Since the OSB has so many layers, the vertical leg (plywood can pull away. That is now solved by sinking a screw down from the too.
The last thing completed for the month was the installation of risers on the main peninsula and on the small bump out.
Up next will be the installation of a plywood end on the bump out peninsula above to give me support on the corners. Installation of the remaining plywood on the egress peninsula. And, installation of plywood on the section underneath which will be the anchor to enter the main peninsula. Drywall next of course. Then painting and finally beginning to lay track!
I will elaborate on my design change in a future post, but I am going to revise the Taylor engine facility and likely the yard body. I found a Station Map / civil engineering plan of Taylor yard. I had forgotten that I bought that back in 2007 from Bob Smaus. That inspired me to change the plan to include the turntable. Thus design changes are in the works.
The last distraction for this blog update is the 1967 Corvette I recently got running. It's in So. Cal. and hadn't run in nearly 20 years. The car has been in my family since 1967.My best friend and master mechanic Scott and I got it running in one day. I've known Scott since we were 3 years old. That's over 50 years of friendship. Anyway, below are some photos of the Vette which will be an Arizona car (in my garage) in March.
That's all for now. I HOPE to show installed track in my next blog post.
