needed to be addressed, not the least of which was minimum
radius. The first rebuild commenced.
Time moved on, perhaps five years after the house was built,
and I’d already outgrown my basement office. Fortunately
there was sufficient property to build another building next
door, and that became my first-floor workshop and second-
floor office. The basement of that building served as the
basement I really didn’t have in the house, due to the layout
occupying most of it.
The former office location was demolished and rebuilt with
curved corners, the well filter equipment was moved out a bit
to permit tracks to go behind it, staging was built in the utility
area, and the main line was extended to go around the entire
basement perimeter. This included a huge, 22’ long double-
ended staging yard in addition to the utility area stub-ended
staging yard. Once all that was up and running and I had the
original part of the layout presentable, in August 2011 I had
an open house/op session – my first. You can read about all of
that by going back to this column:
Feedback was positive, but the ensuing conversations con-
vinced me that I needed to get rid of the pool table near the
new staging yards, and instead use that space to build a nice
new peninsula. Those efforts have been well chronicled in ear-
lier columns. The basic peninsula construction column can be
seen here:
This column details a great deal about the construction of
Mehoopany area of that peninsula:
1: Areas shown in red represent changes to the main
line and therefore new track construction.
1
Getting Real Column - 2
And of course, my last column in May covered the opposite
side of the peninsula, Meshoppen and
Kintner Milling:
You would think that at this point I’d be in the process of get-
ting to the super-detailing phase of the railroad, and refining
my operations with waybills, something I’d been longing to do.
Meanwhile I’d been attending op sessions at Mike Confalone’s
and devoting a great deal of thought to how my own layout
would operate.
It was in early December of 2012 that I realized, on one of my
last bike rides of the season, that there might be a solution to
the aspects of my layout that had been bothering me since
the incorporation of the new peninsula. In fact, I couldn’t wait
to get back home, look at the layout to make sure I wasn’t
MRH-Dec 2013
