The Sketching Continues

As we work on all the projects that need to be done on our recently purchased home before winter hits our corner of Minnesota, the basement home of the future On30 and HO layouts is basically a storage room for the old HO layout sections, boxes of rolling stock and structures and a lot of bins with parts, tools and other model railroading junk.

I have started to tinker on my conversion project to make a On30 Logging steam engine from a HO scale Bachmann 2-8-0 loco. After totally taking the loco apart, (above) I have started rebuilding the tender, widening the frame and cutting the tender body apart in half lengthwise in order to widen it to a scale 7 1/2-feet. That is the progress report on the loco conversion for now.

Of course the pen and paper sketching continues on the proposed On30 and HO layouts. Following a session with a tape measure noting basement dimensions with a bit more 'reality' than I had before, I have been able to get a better idea of what will fit in the new space.

Not to exact scale, these track sketches are more accurate than my earlier efforts.

Here is my latest effort to design the On30 Swamp Logger layout. The space is roughly 11 x 10.5 feet. The track that exits the layout area between the wall and the AC/Heater will head to a small staging yard over the work bench in another part of the basement.

As I've noted in previous posts, the logging layout will be the lower of the two layouts in the space. I'm looking at building this layout at about 44-inches above the floor.

Below is the proposed Big Island Rail/Puna Sugar Co. HO scale layout that will be mounted above the On30 bench work. Despite what the drawing shows, this layout will hover at about 64 to 66 inches above the floor.

The track that leaves the layout area at "Sugar Jct." between the AC unit and the wall will head to the Puna Sugar Co complex, to be above the work bench in the basement.

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