I promised to fill you in on how I packed the layout to move across the country.

First off is the layout was designed to be movable, but not necessarily portable. What I mean by that is the layout was design to move but it is not easy. I have done some Free-mo modules in the past and the point of any modules is that you can take it to and from the site that the meeting is held. This layout is designed to broken into sections, but the sections are 3'x5' and require two people to move them. So they can move with me when the Air Force decides to move me every 4 years but I will not be breaking this thing down to take to conventions any time soon.

The nice thing about moving with the Air Force is that they will provide a moving company to move you things from location to location. So not having to worry about how to get them across the county i could focus on how to make sure they made it in one piece.

My idea was to make two boxes out of the four layout sections, by putting the tops of two layout facing each other I knew that the track would be protected. These two boxes then needed to be protected on all exposed sides to ensure the movers couldn't damage anything.

I wanted to make sure that all sides were protected, to do this I cut strips of 1/2" plywood into widths of 16". This width was calculated by how close I could get the two sections together with some between tracks. Look below to see an example on the gap between the sections

My other big concern was the underside of the layout which has all the wires and switch machines. You can see all of those things below.

To protect the underside I bought some of those 1/2" plywood precut sections from Home Depot and attached it to the legs. This both protected the underside and kept the legs locked in place.

The final product was very solid and was able to protect my layout in the move across country with no damage. Below are some different views of the final product.

I was very proud of the job I did when I was complemented by the movers on the professional job I did!

Now that we are move the layout is up in it's new home

Chris

Time to play some catch-up. Over the last few months I have moved from Lancaster, CA to Warner Robins, GA. This was the first move of the layout and it worked out great. Now we bought a house and the layout is up and ready to work on. Before I go into that, I wanted to talk about some of the things I was able to work on before the move.

I wanted to show the off the three control panels. The control panels were all made from hardboard cut to the desired shape and size, glued, then painted. To give it a CTC panel feel the base is painted forest green and the top is black with white lines depicted the track layout. This stick drawing was actually done by first painted the top white, masking off the lines then painting over it in black. After a couple of coats the tape was removed to give it the look you see below.

The first two, the one shown above and below, were created for the side of the layout with the yard. The panel above was for the mainline and the branch that will be located in this area. The one below is for controling the turnouts in the yard. All switches are servo controlled with hardware from Tam Valley. The cool think about the panel below is that it shows the indication for the yard lead switch which is actually controlled by the panel on the other side of the layout, or since all the turnout are connected to DCC, can be controlled with the throttle.

The control panel shown below is on the other side of the layout and was created to control tortoise machines and be able to show turnout position with LED lights. The turnouts are controlled by two Digitrax DS64. The parts that do not have LED lights yet are for the town that is above this area. All these have hinged tops to allow access to the inside where the hardware resides.

Once I was able to get these up I was able to run a few trains without having to manually lock the switches in place with push pins.

Below are some pictures:

Below is taken as NYC 4028 passes the local freight led by NYC 8887 at the interchange.

Here is Conral 9344 switching out the yard:

Next post I will show some pictures of how it looked when it moved across the country.

Chris