New Digs For The Shop

The railroad had some additional real estate donated to it.  After my sister-in-law moved out my wife relocated her art studio upstairs to the room over the garage.  The space she left behind was right across the hall from the train room so I negotiated for it.  This is another small bedroom, 12' x 12', with a large walk-in closet.  I moved in my desk and added a nice workbench beside it.  Also installed some shelving in the closet for all my railroad stuff.  Very organized.

Originally I was going to have just two parallel tracks on a shelf-style layout above the workbench and use that as a test and programming track.  When I sat down to design it using AnyRail I decided it would make more sense to design it as a switching puzzle.  I set up one end as a Timesaver, designed by John Allen probably 50 or 60 years ago.  The other end is a European design called an Inglenook.  The track will be hand-laid code 70 On30, the same as the layout in the other room.  This will be a DCC layout with power on the tracks.  The control is a DCS51 from Digitraxx and it can run DC or DCC.  The layout is "L" shaped with a switching puzzle at each end and the two tracks running through the curve in between will be 18" and 21" radius curves.  This will give me enough options to put engines and cars through their paces and when I'm not testing or working on the layout I can play with the trains on the puzzles.

The idea behind the puzzles is that each leg services an industry and can hold anywhere from one to three cars.  A program on the laptop generates random car shuffling orders for eight cars and it's up to the operator to perform this task in as few moves as possible.  Time can also be factored in.

Lighting in this room is pretty poor so I installed some LED rope light beneath the shelf layout.  I probably should add some track lighting on the ceiling too.  This will be a great space for building models.  I also set up my stereo system in there for a little music while I'm slaving away.