The years keep ticking along

The 11th year of the Aquia Line had its ups and downs.  The highlights were the winning the best in show at the NMRA MER meet and getting the Aquia line on the cover of Model Railroader magazine. It also marked my restart of writing articles for the model railroad press. I now have a few in the publishing pipeline.

The lows were the floods. The first caused a lot of damage in the basement. Fortunately, the Aquia layout survived with very little damage, though I removed PoLA and sold it to my friend Tom. He promptly moved to Austin, Texas and took PoLA with him!

The second flood didn't hurt the layout, but required extensive repairs in  the upstairs part of the house. The upheaval from that work forced me to cancel the op sessions for the North East Interchange, even though that event was the hinge point of all my long term planning for the layout. Then my mom got sick, which postponed nearly all hobby activities.

It turns out that I did very little work on the Aquia Line last year. I did travel a lot and saw lots of layouts. In fact, I did more work and attended more op sessions on other people's layouts than my own.

There is still work to do on the Aquia Line. I will try to get more done this upcoming year, but it will be tough as my mom needs more care and I will probably get a hip replacement as my arthritis is getting bad. What little hobby time I have had has been siphoned off to my renewed interesting in wargaming, which I enjoy and my wife seems to support too. So it hasn't been all bad.

This year started off with an unusual project. For his Christmas present, my younger brother requested that I build a display shelf for his 3-rail O scale train set. He and his fiancé set up a train layout under their Christmas tree. He provides the trains, a Lionel GG-1 with seven passenger cars. She provides the scenery, a large collection of ceramic buildings with lighting, etc.

The two shelf sections are just
under 10 feet long

He wanted a shelf where he could display his trains during the rest of the year when they are not under the tree. He wanted some scenery on the shelf too.

Since I didn't have a chance to build it before Christmas, it became the first project of the new year.  The shelf is composed of two poplar 1x6 boards, each 5 feet long. I squared up the boards and used Festool Dominos to align the two pieces.

The Festool dominos are visible on the left of the front shelf

Then I made roadbed sections using 1/8th inch MDF.  I cut the roadbed strips with a 45 degree taper using my track saw. I glued and brad nailed the road bed pieces to the poplar boards. Then I used my Festool Rotex sander to reduce the angle of repose of the shoulder of the roadbed and to carve out some ditches in the poplar board.

It was a simple matter to spike down some Atlas O scale track, paint and scenic it. I used some sand I purchased at Michaels craft store as ballast. It had a sparkle, so I needed to spray the track with a light coat of gray to kill the gloss. I didn't have enough tan ballast, so I used some N Scale cinders to line the edge of the road bed.  Some ground foam and static grass completed the scenery.

I didn't build the shelf brackets. It is up to him to figure out how he plans to mount it is his home.

Finished product