This progress report is made possible by Black Friday and the number 10,000...

The lines at the mall started around 7pm in anticipation of it opening at 12 midnight...There were people camped out all week at Best Buy... There were near riots at Victoria's Secrets over under garments.. I love Black Friday!  Not because I go out to fight the crowds to get the big bargains, because I don't.  No, I love Black Friday because the girls head out in the wee hours of the morning to go shopping for the entire day, and I get some honest to goodness me time!  Which this year I put to good use working on the layout.

My Black Friday dinner.  Does it get any better than fine wine, and awesome thin crust pizza from Ciro's in Matawan NJ?  I don't think so. :)

So starting on Black Friday on through to this past weekend I made a major push to try and get all of the sub roadbed and track laying completed.  I glued down all the track that still needed it, I glued down the Styrofoam base on the removable York Station scene and built the two removable active staging modules. I also glued down Styrofoam and cork onto the modules.  This past weekend I also picked up two Atlas wye turnouts at the Greenberg Train Show in Edison NJ to use on the staging modules.  

All the pieces are cut for the two staging modules.

Staging module framework is finished in this picture and is just waiting for the Styrofoam base to be glued on.

Ready for roadbed.

Here are the two staging modules with the cork roadbed glued down.  Behind them is the York Station area module with its foam base glued on. 

The staging modules are active fiddle type staging areas with each track able to hold 7- 40' boxcars.  The longest trains anticipated to be run on the layout would be trains number 31 and 32, the two manifest trains that ran between Baltimore and York each day. They each will be about 12-14 cars long.  Most of all the other trains that are run during a op-session will be either short locals, or the two car passenger runs, so I anticipate the staging modules will be more than big enough.  The two staging modules along with the York Station scene are portable and are not connected to the layout when there is no operating session.

Lower deck with staging module shown at the end of the York Station scene.

The upper deck showing the staging module at the end of the Red Lion scene.

I have to get around to revising the plans shown above because what I have built to date has varied in some areas and is no longer accurately portrayed on the plan.  Mainly this is because of acquiring accurate track maps of the areas being modeled which caused me to modify the track arrangements on the fly while building the layout.  Notice that the staging modules show one track instead of the two actually being laid down.  I originally wanted to use something I saw on quite a few Ian Rice track plans, staging cassettes, but decided against it and went with a simple two track fiddle yard arrangement instead.

Sometime this week I'm going to try and get the York Enginehouse and York Station modules up on their legs and attached to the layout along with the staging modules.  I need to get roadbed and track down on them, then I'll disconnect them again while I work on the rest of the layout.

On a final note: Sometime within the last week, the blog had its 10,000th visitor.  I was so busy dealing with family issues that it quietly slipped by me.  Thank you again to everyone who has taken the time to read this blog!  I'm not, nor ever claimed to be, a professional writer and I know it probably shows quite often.  But I hope you will forgive me for the occasional butchering of the English language here and hopefully you enjoy the blog and sometimes get something useful out of it.  Thank you again from the bottom of my heart!


Tune in next time for:

FEEDER FRENZY!!!!

 Oooooooo.. He said Feeders!

 /

I'll explain it in the next post.