Trainset

 

As my friends of mine know, I’ve been in to model railroading for quite some time. My original table was when I was a kid and was pretty simplisitic.
Then We revived it in one of my old houses. And THEN it really took off. Here’s a picture of the train table about a month before Hurricane Katrina.

This table unfortunately got ruined by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. In fact, as proof of the dedication to the train table, the first item recovered from my house in Gentilly was indeed my HO scale Pickle factory. But we didn’t let that kill it forever. I’ve been building up a collection of box cars, people, buildings, and other important scenery.

In January 2006,  I took a trip to Houston to visit Sternum and we attended the Great American Train Show, where I acquired more boxcars, some buildings, figures, and just soaked in some of the sights of different layouts. Some of the interesting things we got there include but are not limited to:  Nudist figures, giraffes, mobile home models, and literally a ton of boxcars.

Now we have begun building the new table.

Here’s Record of the new Train table progress.

Day 1 of Construction: First leg of the table is built. A little tall, but built.

Day 2 of Construction: The framing for the other side is built. Shortened the legs to the first table part by about 6 inches.

Day 3 of Construction: Let’s put the other top on and see what it looks like with the buildings spread out on it.

Day 4 of Construction: Added the center piece for the inside curve, spackled and painted. All while the town waits paitiently outside in the backyard.
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Day 5 of Construction: Laying down raodbed and track.

Day 6 of Construction: We were working on correcting flubs in the turns where the turn was a little too imperfect for the train’s liking.

Day 7 of Construction: We have a complete loop and we’re testing the train out! There’s still a few areas that are giving the train some problems, but that’s mere child’s play (pun intended) in comparison.

Day 8 of Construction: We’ve fixed the quirks that we were having last time and tested the track again with 2 engines pulling 15 cars. We’ve also started putting out the buildings so we can figure out the town mapping.

Days 9-11 of Construction: Time to starting building some of the remaining buildings.

Days 12-14 of Construction: Where should everything go in this town? We begin City layout so we can decide where roads and sidewalks and such are gonna be. To create roads, we taped off with painter’s tape and sprayed Bed Liner Coating (the stuff that they use to protect the bed of a pickup truck). We then taped off again once it dried and laid sidewalks using a Grey wall paint that I bought at the hardware store in a sample size for like $2 or $3. (score!)

Here’s what it looks like as of 4/5/14

Update 9/7/15: I’ve added quite a bit of buildings including an old fashioned McDonald’s, a Waffle House, a Tall building, a giant Tarzan stature (courtesy of Krazy), and a couple other odds and ends that I’ve picked up along the way. We’re working on a Biergarden, Adamms Ave, and figuring out where the rest of my building are going to go. I also need to figure out a way to display/store the rest of my box cars and engines, as I have about 140 cars altogether, which is obviously way too many for my table. I’ve visited the Crescent City Model Railroad Club’s layout as well as the Train in City Park’s Botanical Garden (which is G scale), and I’ve seen tons of video of the awesomeness that is Wunderland.

If you’ve never seen Miniature Wunderland, I’d highly recommend checking out the videos of it. My sister got to visit it when she went to Germany a few years ago and thats where aforementioned Biergarten came from along with a German Police Car and a few other odds and ends.

In the upcoming week, I’ll be cleaning up my table, fixing kinks in the track, putting buildings down along with grass, trees, cars and people in true places, not just in a jumbled mess like they are in the pic below.

Update 10/3/15

So, over the past few weeks, we pulled all the buildings off the table to dust them and work on train derail issues. We fixed all the issues and added an inside track for adding additional boxcars and engines, and we added ballast to the tracks to add a notch of realism. To add ballast, we used a mix of Grey fine ballast by Woodland Scenics, and light gray medium ballast. To glue it down we used a mix of school glue, water, and Woodland Scenic Cement.

I’ve also been testing my street lights, the light-up billboards, and researching moving cars, which right now seems to be quite an investment ($150 per car), but damn, they look cool.

But we’ve got a lot of plans and surprises for the table in the near future.

Here’s a few pictures of the ballasting and the new track. Special thanks to Curtis, Willis, Grant, and Dave for their help on all this over the past few weeks. We’re now adding grass and cleaning other aspects up on the table including wiring.

More of the buildings are taking shape!  Enter Addams Ave, the “rough” part of town! (Taken 10/15/15)

 

More recent news:  

The parade.  No trainset would be complete in Picklescoop’s house without a parade.  Additionally,  more light up signs,  updates on the wiring, new buildings,  more people coming and more.  

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December 3, 2017: The Faller system is working!! Streetcar is working! A ton more people at the parade, moving around some of the buildings and adding cars in different places. The pictures were taken while we were still moving buildings around, but the video shows most of the layout’s updates. Santa and the kids visiting came in, the utility pole truck for the parade arrived, I have big roll around garbage cans and standard commercial dumpsters to build and put out. I have tables and chairs for inside of the restaurants. I need to build some kind of shelves for inside of the “Half Foods” Grocery store (not to be confused with Whole Foods). Stay tunes for more updates