March 2019 update

I only worked on the layout one day this entire month. Last Tuesday Patrick came over for the first time since last fall. It has been a long winter of little progress.

I did have a few visitors this month, including forum member Matt R and his family. The others were some old train buddies of mine from here in town. So the Builder made a few trips around the layout.

Patrick and I started out in the unheated shop. It was still pretty chilly out there. We moved a bunch of stuff around, so we could use the table saw to cut plywood strips for the new project, which is preparing to add skirts to the lower benchwork. I'm going to be using landscape fabric, and it will be stapled to these plywood strips we're adding.

My knee was doing pretty good with all the rest I had given it by not working. I managed to get down and sit on the floor, and more importantly get back up, probably a dozen times last Tuesday. However, by the end of the day, I was hurting again.

We started with the south side of aisle three, because it was a nice straight section, and the best place to figure out how to do this. The only thing we had to work around was the outlets, which after the first one were pretty easy.

This is where it started to get interesting. We added some supports, then using 1/4" Luan plywood we bent a curve, trying to follow the fascia. Here we're gluing on the second lamination.

Finally, the third lamination is glued.

Patrick added latches to three of the four hinged electrical panels. We'll get to the last one this week when he comes over on Tuesday again.

After we had done those parts of aisle three, Patrick did a quick project on the upper deck behind the East Minneapolis yard. He added some of the plywood strips so I could build an embankment between the Roseville lead and the back yard track. Without them there was nothing to attach cardboard to.

Then we moved over to aisle one and did the long straight section on the south side.

We also did this short piece on the north side.

Getting this latch on wasn't as easy as it looks. The wires on the other side of the panel, were hitting the leg of the benchwork. The only solution was to trim the corner off the leg to make room for the bulky wire bundle.