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.