The train room expansion is now mechanically complete. The last leftover plywood was hauled away yesterday. Complete, in this case, means the sheetrock is finished. I started painting during the week and yesterday started a coat of Kilz on the ceilings. A few items like the stools and my Santa Fe paint can wastebasket have moved upstairs. This paint can is one I liberated from the (abandoned) Santa Fe West Wichita shop in about 1969. The color of paint it contained is marked as AS&SF Suede Gray, which means it’s entirely possible this could have been a MoPac paint also, for the interiors of locomotive cabs.

In the original train room and what I call the annex, which is an L-shaped storage room, I had put up Masonite backdrop with curves of about 16″ radius. To connect with the new area, we had to cut through this and now I have to terminate the backdrop, which I think I’ll do by using spackling to blend it into the sheetrock surface. This cut edge is right past another place where I’ll cut a hole in the wall to make a decent radius curve, so it may not be very noticeable.

In other places where I didn’t have room for a radiused backdrop, I had used cove molding. This was 1-5/8″ stock, and the edges are about 1/4″ deep so, when I butted the Masonite up to it, there was a small step which is noticeable but at least it’s not a square corner. I probably bought mine from Home Despot but when I googled it just now, the first hit I got was from Lowe’s and it shows one that I like better, which seems to have no edge. There’s a Lowe’s about five miles east of me, and I’ve come to notice that they have better stuff on average than Home Despot does (which I think lots of people seem to think is true). At the time I was bringing stuff home for the previous construction, Home Despot was my best option.

Back to the railroad, I’m doing background stuff like collecting all the wood inventory in one convenient place. Not much modelbuilding going on. My next big challenge is getting a floor guy to want to lay vinyl tile around the legs of the existing layout, which is bolted to the walls with 3/8″ carriage bolts. I solved that by building a lifter which consists of an automotive scissor jack bolted on top of a structure consisting of vertical 2x4s with some stability bracing. This allows me to lift parts of the layout so that a leg or two comes up off the floor. I proved that it works by removing the last of the 44-year-old carpet that had been trapped under said legs. By the way, a few of the railroad’s legs naturally don’t touch the underfloor since the framing is so rigid and I installed them on top of the carpet.

Ron Merrick