Refurbishing the unfinished train layout.

 About 30-35 years ago, Dick Miller started an N gauge model railroad.  Built on a 32" hollow core door, it was complete: buildings, track, switches, wiring for lights, power, etc.  It even ran, but, it had no scenery.  There were most of the components to do so but it was never finished.

First step of many, deconstruct the track layout.  In traditional anal-retentive style, if the track had a nail hole, there was a nail.

Finally, a track inventory- plus lots of other track that was not on the layout.

Building inventory

Rolling stock

The rebuild and refurbishment begins.  First up, a base layer of foam board.  This does a couple of things including being able to add negative relief scenery without digging into the wood and make the layout run nice and quiet.

Sketching layouts with terrain 

Waiting for glue to dry

Glue dried

 

Time to start sculpting

Work on the right side starts

the back board is just for forming against

all blocked in.   sculpting to commence

Left side sculpting continues.   lots of smoothing to do here.

More smoothing

Let mix dry after doing some bulk carving before it set up

Applying the plaster mix to the mountains

Throwing some paint onto the mountains

Tunnel portal

Work around the pond.  The colors should give the feeling of depth and undergrowth.  Landscaping will get done prior to the pouring of the "water".

More mountain work.

Church on its hill.

Various scenery ready for paint- all but the church and portal are 3D printed

For the tank farm.

Pond and creek view from the rear

More painting

Ready for tracks- the colors will change the way the landscaping looks once the ballast, dirt, grass and surface materials are in place.   It should provide depth of field.

Fitting the main line through the portal. [for future use, possible extension point]

Cementing the bigger bridges into place [note the spray bottle holding the little girder bridge down on it's moorings]

A week or so passes, fiddling with a whole bunch of items from the 3D printer that may or may not wind up here.  FYI, all the bridges are 3D printed.  Most of the buildings were existing stock from the original layout.  

Back to the pond trolley.  Dry fitting the track to get the curves,

Trolley roadbed; "let glue dry"-the great builder Laura Kampf

Laying some tracks

Test Run

Flying by

Existing street cars- they do not like 8" radius turns

Track rough in on mountains

Ballasting the loop

Railbed to the right

Ground cover around the pond

Filling the pond; adding ground more cover

Ground cover complete and pond spilling over the dam.  Let glue dry.

More roadbed.  That's white paintable latex caulk since I couldn't find gray at a reasonable price.  grrrr.

Just a little bit more road bed to lay.

US-17: the final leg

 

After a one year delay, US-17 will be completed.  The first of our end-to-end series.  Our month at Jekyll Island concluded, we head southwestish towards Orlando, avoiding the interstates as much as possible.  Friday, December 2, we headed to the Winter Haven Howard Johnsons where last year's dog attack took place pausing just long enough to reset the trip odometer.  We have no desire to stay here ever again; Taffee is fine.   She shook it off like the little champ she is, but this place just has some bad mojo.

Hurricane Ian ravaged this final stretch of 17 to Punta Gorda.  And as before, getting this final piece of 17 completed became a chore with the local Winter Festival blocking all of the major East-West streets in the center corridor of the city.  

Blue tarps are a common sight along the way.  Even some church roofs were entirely cloaked in tarps.

We snuck down an alley to finally get to US-17's southern terminus.

And with that one year delay, our first end-to-end is complete.  
What's next?

Here we are

We are ready for the off to Jekyll Island for our vacation.  Yes, we're both retired.    H O W E V E R, this past 8 months have been a near whirlwind of chaos.   First, we decided to try to sell our home of 33 years in Baltimore.  Our fears were we would have missed the housing bubble AND that it would sit on the market for an extended period due to its age as well as the fact it is in Baltimore.   Thankfully, our listing agent made it all so simple sounding with the hard part getting the pre-sales work completed before listing.   He was right; lots of work got done- stuff we had been putting off for years. 

Jean had shoulder replacement surgery scheduled for late June/ early July and the expected 'to sell' date was approximately 6 weeks after we listed, based on the market at that time we were not concerned about any overlaps; the house sold in 2 days.  TWO DAYS.  Well, that just made our lives more interesting.  We asked the buyer to rent back the house until Jean was fully ambulatory in late July which they had no problem doing.  Then, after all the pre-sales work we did clearing out and paring down, the rest had to be packed by a two people with three good arms.

The move to The Estate was to relatively painless with professionals handing the big pieces of furniture for the final move out day.  Now, we had planned on building a modular or stick built house on the property of The Estate; even had a building site selected.  Between the time delay to build AND the costs [which were for all intents and purposes, the same] we decided to look at the existing housing nearby with three stipulations: no more than 20 minutes from The Estate [to act as a guest house]; roughly 1500 sf rancher/rambler; 'move-in' ready; and, less than building new with the 'all-in' costs figured.  We gave ourselves 2 weeks to figure this out and commit one way or the other.

A couple of viewing later we recruited a local buyers' agent to aid the process.  And she was a gem.  Seriously, if you are in the market in the Cumberland-Romney-Keyser tri-cities area, talk with Taylor Kiggens- she is the best.  She sent us a prelisting for a house just down the road from The Estate- literally just down the road, three miles, no turns.  A lovely 1500 sf brick rancher built in the late 1960's for sale by the estate of the original owners who had the house built.   It sits on about an acre and a quarter just off Patterson Creek with lots of recent improvements [metal roof, newish heat pump, etc].  So we put an off in and poof- it was ours.  So now we get to hire contractors to do some painting and flooring

, maybe change our the dated kitchen counter; a collection of little things but nothing that would prevent move-in on closing day if we wanted to.  Sadly, all the local contractors are busy so the earliest anyone could get in to do the stuff was January; we decided to tackle the stuff we could ourselves and farm out the complex things- counter, carpet cleaning, some plumbing updates, etc.  

Before we left for our annual Jekyll getaway, the kitchen, main bedroom and sewing room were done-done with the basement and tractor shed as done as they're gonna get for now, AND we have a  new backyard gazebo to screen in over the winter.  The living room and guest room/office is next up on our return, but for now, we vacation.

Changes- chapter 2022

 As we noted earlier, things changed with COVID.  We had originally intended to retire in 2023 but the opportunity window of the post COVID environment was open and we jumped.  Another big change was the housing market; all the sudden, people are buying houses.....in our neighborhood....on our block. ..... and not turning them into multi-family dwellings.   The iron was hot and we struck it.  It took almost 2 months to get our house ready for sale instead of the two years we had planned.  We learned that plasterers command top dollar for their work and if anyone is looking for a trade that is in extremely high demand and also very rare, it's plastering.  
Long story short, we listed out house with the expectations of it being about 30 days until we got a reasonable offer; it was 2.  TWO, with a 21 day closing.  Soooooooo off to Westbygodvirginia we go, multiple loads to our storage locker [yes, we're one of "them" now] and a new shed, AKA the Red Shed on the property to store even more stuff just to get the house cleared out in time.

As of this writing, we are considering both new build on the Estate and purchasing an existing home but we are leaning towards new build.  Several floor plans are contenders in modular or stick built configurations. That decision will have to made soon. 

We Made Another Thing

 Outside living areas are the bomb; we have a really nice one planned for The Estate but wanted one for home.  Some leftover sand from the reconstructed addition, couple dozen pavers, existing 2 bys, some old rebar stakes, a flagstone found buried in the grass and the glider off the front porch.  Add two planter pots [exact locations are still in progress both them, the planter box and hanging basket brackets to be addressed once summer plants / flowers are available in a few weeks] and a new fire pit from Lowes..... final bit of yard clean up to follow.

We Made a Thing

Board gaming is fun activity and let's us keep the old strategic and analytical juices flowing.  Now when we say "board game" we mean games like Ticket to Ride [any version], Champions of Midgard or Wingspan, not Monopoly or Life: sorry [see what we did there?].  These board games can have a very large foot print- Champions of Midgard is roughly 30 by 40 when using the official game mat [which replaces all three game boards] not including table space for the game components: warrior dice, Valhalla tokens, food, wood, etc.

 Board game tables are very nice, but very expensive.  These are not your ordinary card or even poker tables; they are much larger [think 40 x 48 or 42 x 60], usually rectangular and covered in a flocked material typically neoprene [mousepad material].  Some of these tables can run thousands of dollars with all the bells and whistles, like under rail lights, built in dice towers, component trays and of course, drink holders.
An alternative is a game table topper, which mounts to a standard card table while offering most of the amenities above; these can be found on places like Amazon for $200-$500 a pop depending on options.  Being not quite so flush with cash to devote that much money for a twice a week hobby, we decided to make our own topper.  There are numerous videos online to show how to convert an Ikea dining room table to a game table for only a few hundred bucks including the actual table, but we wanted to be even simpler and still have the card table for those occasions. 
Behold, the first ever Miller Board Game Topper.
Materials List:

• existing, sturdy card table [32 x 32] 
• 2 yards of flocked neoprene; we chose dark red - $15 from Amazon
• half sheet of 1/2" sanded plywood [cabinet grade was out of stock at Home Depot]- $45
• 4 scrap pieces of 1 x 4 or 1 x 3 about a foot long for the topper's "feet"
• 4 small bar clamps [to be replaced by small C clamps] - $6
• handful of short deck or wood screws

Cut the plywood to desired size- ours is 42 x 48.  Find center point, measure out where the "feet" go, attach and dry fit before securing all the "feet".  The "feet" should be snug against the existing table sides.  Use the bar / C clamps to clamp the "feet" to the card table's sides to prevent table tip-overs when someone leans on the top's edge.  Drape fabric over the topper and cut to length.  Using a staple gun with short staples [we used 1/4"] attach the fabric to the underside of the topper, mitering the corners as best you can.   

 Viola!   Rails may be easily added later as we haven't decided on that yet.