Honestly, I've been dragging a bit on the layout over the last few weeks. I have been busy though. I've gone through numerous boxes of stuff and gotten rid of everything from old household papers (the shredder got such a workout it literally started smoking!), various pieces of wood, old VHS tapes, magazines, and even some half-started projects that will now never see the light of day. Sometimes you need to completely clean house.
Anyway, if it seems like I haven't been blogging about layout progress lately that's the reason. Entirely necessary but hardly interesting enough to blog about!
Back to Saturday. First of all, I appreciate Stic coming by, if for no other reason than it helped get me rolling again. Besides, Beauregard and Molly like him....
Plan for the day was to finish some benchwork alterations that involve adding a turntable and small engine house to what had been the town of Randolph and will now be a town based (in spirit, if not details!) on Montpelier Junction. Montpelier Junction didn't have a turntable at the time I'm modeling. I don't have room for a wye but I do have a nicely completed Diamond Scale turntable. The turntable came off my SNE #1 layout (see MRP 2000) and is still sitting in the piece of 3?4" plywood sub roadbed for that layout. The turntable "unit" is about 18" square and almost 12" deep (to accommodate the New York Railway Supply drive unit) so
fitting it in place required some benchwork alterations beyond simply cutting out a circle. In classic Tom Sawyer fashion I convinced Stic into doing all the kneeling, bending etc... (see photo below) under and between the benchwork joists. 
A: No, I don't feel guilty about it.
Not even a little bit.
By the end of the day we'd gotten the turntable planted in the layout and had worked out the track and structure arrangement that seems to work best. Can't wait to get the track laid in this area and finally get some scenery down.
Hell of a lot of screws in that benchwork!
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