New posts in this seemingly never-ending series will now be here.

Between the new train room and the old one is a corridor about sixteen feet long which I cut through the attic, taking out several feet of the old railroad in the process. I had visions of connectiong the two by hanging a track from the walls of the corridor somehow.

So now that’s happening. On the Conway Springs sub, I’m extending the track past the point where I’ve cut through the wall. I needed to cut through the wall because the construction contractor put a doorway at that point, and I had to go behind it in order to get the required 30″-ish curvature. Fortunately I can access the attic at that point. So now I have two holes in the wall. with track through them, and I’m in the process of walling in that track with Masonite backing to insulate it from the attic proper. There’ll be photos soon. At this time, that track suspended from the wall will be dead-ending in mid-air until I figure out what to do next.

And it gets crazier. On the opposite wall, I’m extending the track north from Durand but I realized I could build this as a siding, so as to have a place to store a train. So the main track will have a code 55 siding, turnouts at each end, where I can at least leave a train with a runaround possibility. Maybe the other end of this track will go somewhere one of these days.

And I’ve moved module 9 in place, leaving me still with a way to get from one side of the room to the other since module 8 is not ready for prime time. Modules 14 1nd 15, through the wall at the opposite corner of the room, are now officially connected completely wired. Since I can run on into the storage yard, that’s really a big improvement since I happened to use live-frog turnouts and can run directly into any yard track even though I hadn’t done any wiring on those modules. (Yay!)

Oh, back to the the Conway Springs sub. I’d laid this track with Barge cement on the rail base, and it almost all came loose. Perhaps because there is more of a temperature swing there than anywhere else in the room. 😥 So, I have re-spiked close to thirty feet of this track and rebuilt a few turnouts, and now it’s secure. A few humps in the track, but what the heck, it’s a secondary branch line with somewhere around 20 or 30 mph speed restriction at best, and not that much business beyond Frontier outside of grain harvest season.

I hand-laid the track that’s behind the wall on a single piece of subroadbed and slid it into place. Now that’s installed, I’ve had to align it crosswise so it is glued in one or two places and pretty much locked in, so it won’t come out that easily. Not my problem, I suppose.

Ron Merrick