Spent a chunk of the afternoon installing this bit of benchwork -- finding the right height for it, leveling it off, screwing all the bits in place. It turned out to be a lot more fiddling than I thought it would. It always does.

I wanted to keep it as low as possible without impeding the passage of dome liner cars on the tracks beneath. I found the ideal height through a little experimentation -- inching the posts up and down a quarter inch at a time, then pushing dome cars back and forth along the track.

With that settled, I had only to cut the lumber I needed, then screw it in place, easily the least enjoyable part of the job. I had to contort myself into all kinds of yoga poses I didn't know I could do to fit myself beneath the bench so I could drill out the needed holes, then drive screws into each of them.

About three hours later, with a short break for lunch, this 20 x 48 inch piece is in place. The passenger station will eventually be erected over five tracks on the near end of the plywood sheet. 

To give you an idea what’s been going on along the Lost Continent Railway, here’s an overhead shot of the layout. Compare with April 4, 2011.

In my spare time this weekend, between washing clothes and tending to a plumbing emergency, I laid twenty-four feet of track; made templates to build four of the switches in the middle of the layout; made an adjustment to the road bed that ran a little too close to the track below it, preventing dome cars from passing beneath; tried and failed to figure out why I can’t seem to cut track joiners with my Dremel tool without shattering the cutoff wheel, spraying my face with bits of grit and initiating a cloudburst of cussing; connected temporary electrical jumpers to the longest stretch of track to run a choo-choo train back and forth just for the hell of it; searched high and low for a piece of crossover track that I know I bought a month or two ago, but never did find it; and soldered, soldered, soldered but never once burned my fingers! It’s one for the record books!

All weekend long I’ve had this song stuck in my head:

I’ve been working on the raillll-road all the live-long day.
I’ve been working on the railroad just to pass the time away.
Can’t you hear the whistle blowing? Rise up so early in the morn.
Can’t you hear the captain shouting, “Dinah, blow your horn!”

Dinah, won’t you blow, Dinah, won’t you blow,
Dinah, won’t you blow your hor-roar-roarn!
Dinah, won’t you blow, Dinah, won’t you blow,
Dinah, won’t you blow your horn!

Someone’s in the kitchen with Dinah.
Someone’s in the kitchen, I know-woe-woe-woe.
Someone’s in the kitchen with Die-nah!
Strummin’ on the old banjo.

Come, sing it:
Fee fie fiddle dee eye oh
Fee fie fiddle dee eye oh oh oh oh
Fee fie fiddle dee eye oh
Strummin’ on the old banjo.

I love that song. It’s one of the first songs I can remember my mother singing to me (that, and “Mississippi Mud”) when I was just a pup. I suppose it could be her fault that I’m a train nerd.

Just because I haven’t been posting updates about my project to rebuild the LoCo Railway doesn’t mean I haven’t been tacking on a little benchwork here and a little more there to keep the project going. Whenever I can find twenty minutes or so I sneak down to the basement to see what I can add to it, but there’s been quite a lot going on during the past two weeks to keep me from doing much. For the past five days I’ve spent all day every day downtown with My Darling B at the 13th Annual Wisconsin Film Festival, not thinking of work or anything else except relaxing in a darkened room watching beautifully made films. And the weekend before that I was … well, I can’t remember what we were doing the weekend before that, but it kept me really busy.

Instead of going straight back to work the day after the film fest, My Darling B got the brilliant idea of taking off the Monday after so we could enjoy an emergency back-up, time-delayed weekend during which we could sit around in our pajamas, reading the paper and sipping coffee, in order to put ourselves in the right frame of mind to go back to the office. Did us a world of good.

After this morning’s coffee and pajamas, I stole a few hours this afternoon to cut some plywood for the stretch of road that runs past the front side of the layout. The ply had to be screwed down to the benchwork so it was level from side to side, and so that it ran slightly uphill the long way. Took a bit longer to figure out than I thought it would, but I got there eventually.

Even though this looks like much the same photo I took of the layout benchwork yesterday, it’s a do-over, because an unwritten but widely acknowledged law of the universe clearly states that we can’t have it exactly right the first time, can we?

In point of fact, the big doughnut I cut out and glued together yesterday was exactly, but exactly as big as I meant to make it: sixty inches across. The reason I had to rebuild it was not because the Big Cosmic F.U. reached in and bumped my elbow to make me gank up an angle or cut a board too short. No, what happened was that, for reasons I can’t quite wrap my head around, I figured that the doughnut had to be sixty inches across. That was not correct. The doughnut had to be sixty-nine inches across, and the difference is significant enough that I could not fudge it, alter the plan just a little bit and use the sixty-inch doughnut after all. There will be no fudging going on here. I’m sticking to the plan.

So, after I pulled my head completely out of my ass – knock wood – I revved up the table saw again and ripped another two-by-four sheet of plywood into eight-inch-wide lengths, then chopped them up into angled pieces with the miter saw and glued them together to make the much wider doughnut that you see in the updated photo. And now I’ve got a roadbed that matches the plan of the layout, and all will be well. Huzzah.

I spent about three hours trying to figure out how to make this goddamned thing.

I needed a great big doughnut-shaped piece of plywood sixty inches across I could lay a curve of railroad track on. The easiest way to do this is: Get a sheet of plywood sixty inches wide, draw a big circle on it, cut the circle out with a jigsaw – done!

But that leaves you with a big sheet of plywood with a sixty-inch hole cut out of the middle that you can’t do much with, if anything. To use the plywood up as completely as possible, I figured that I could cut it into nine-inch-wide strips, then cut the strips into much shorter blocks with ends angled so that, when I put them together, they would make an almost-circle. I figured a twelve-sided shape would give me the best circle, and I knew that I would have to cut the ends at a fifteen-degree angle, but the part I had the hardest time figuring out was how long to make each piece.

You’d think the internet would have the answer to this, but it doesn’t, or at least it doesn’t have an answer I can understand. Most of the forumlas I found had cosines and square roots and all that geometrical crap I didn’t understand when I had a teacher to pester with stupid questions. No teacher hanging around my house today, though, so I had to come up with something on my own.

And what I came up with was this: The big circle was sixty inches in diameter. That means the circumference was almost one hundred eighty-eight and a half inches. I wasn’t building a circle, I was building what is technically known as a dodecagon, but twelve sides is so many that it almost looks like a circle, so I figured each piece of it should be fifteen and three-quarters inches long on the outside by dividing 188.5 by twelve and calling it close enough.

And you know what? It worked. I started getting kind of worried as I cut up the plywood pieces because they looked too short, but after I pieced it together I laid a tape measure across the whole great big thing and what do you know, it turned out to be sixty inches across. You’re as amazed as I am, aren’t you?

It’s another post about the big plywood box I’m building in the basement! I keep adding to it even though I haven’t brought it to your attention in quite a while. If I had, the posts would have looked something like this: It’s a big box. It’s a bigger box. It’s an even bigger box. So you can probably see why I haven’t mentioned it.

I’ve been making the box bigger and bigger each weekend by adding more benchwork on either side. It would make one hell of a great basement bar if I changed gears at this point and put a walnut top on it right now, lined the wall with shelves for gin and rum, and hung a disco ball from the ceiling. Too bad I don’t drink anything stronger than beer. And I’m boring. A basement bar just doesn’t fill any of my social needs.

A basement train set, on the other hand, suits my social needs perfectly. Make what you want out of that, I’ve come to terms with it. So there won’t be any walnut top, no bottle-lined shelves and no disco ball. Instead, there will be fluorescent lighting and a nifty control panel to make the trains go around. It’s not as wild and crazy as a bar but it’s still kind of fun if you never bothered to mature any farther than eight years old.

The train tracks will make a big figure eight, crossing in the middle of the room over the big box in the center, so I’ve been working on building the bench tops that reach out like wings from either end of the middle. Last weekend I added wings to the right, and although you can’t quite see it in this photo, I spent a few nights this week putting together one of the wings on the left. Then I had a facepalm moment.

I realized as I was finishing up the left-hand wing that after the benchwork was put together I’d have one hell of a time turning on the overhead fluorescent lights. Up until this point I’d been walking right up to them and yanking on the pull chain. That’s no problem right now, but after the benchwork covers the floor and fills in that whole end of the basement I won’t be able to walk over to the lights on the far side of the room at all, so building the benchwork came to a screeching halt while I mulled over how to wire together all the lights.

And that’s what I’ve been doing this weekend. A few trips to the hardware store, a few hours on a stepladder, a little cussing and some sore muscles later, and now the lights are plugged into a series of overhead electric outlets that are connected by an easy-to-get-to switch on the wall. And now I can get back to building a great big box.

Day One of the Rebuild of the New Lost Continent Railway: The benchwork. [I know it looks like a big, empty box with no sides. Play along with me here.]

I’ve been pecking away at this a little bit through the week, whenever I could find an hour or two after dinner. The frames at the ends and in the middle of the bench are salvaged from the previous incarnation of the LoCo but I had to clean them up a bit to make them work for this layout: saw off some dowels, pull out some nails, shorten the legs from fifty-three to forty-eight inches, and add blocks to the corners to make the bench a bit more rigid (I hope).

They were cleaned up and ready to go this morning and I had even found time to rip a set of rails from three-quarter inch plywood, so I after our Sunday morning routine of coffee and a show I changed out of my jammies into some work trousers and began the first steps of piecing together the New Lost Continent Railway.

I finished the frame nearest the camera this morning, working slowly to see how well the salvaged pieces fit together as part of the new plan. I thought of this mostly as a test; if it didn’t work out, I was going to chop it up into little pieces and start over again with new lumber. Happily, it went together so smoothly that I ripped four more rails this afternoon and pieced together the back half of the bench this evening.

This is about all I had time for today. To go on to the next step, which will have to be moving a pile of books out of the corner if I want to have the room I need to keep building, I’ll have to go back to eking out an hour here and there after supper.