A City Above, A Railroad Below - April Layout Update

so I've been making a lot of progress on the layout recently and I realized that I haven't really been recording any of it so I thought now is the time to step back say hello and talk about what I've been up [Music] to so my last few videos I talked about how I was making some garbage loads for my trash gondilas um I did some foam contouring for the mountains and the valley area and really the last big update talked about how the wiring was done or at least the beginning of the wiring was done the two individual blocks are completely separate they're running the trains are going and every single one of the sidings has also been isolated which also means that I'm finally able to run some trains and I haven't realized how much I've missed running the trains until I actually got to do it i set up a different consist every night and I let it go and what I realize is that the trains run in the background for a few hours and suddenly it's the middle of the night and I've lost track of time and because I have a full yard in place um to store my equipment I've been bringing a lot of my passenger stuff out of storage and I didn't realize that I actually had more equipment than I had remembered at least half of what I've own um I've come by secondhand and I haven't paid close attention to what I'm collecting because I have a wish list of things I'd like to get and when they come up online I do my best to act on them providing the price is fair and along those lines of picking up equipment when I find it I recently made some purchases this month i found someone online that just happened to be selling um a previous release of Rapito's Via Rail Smoothside passenger cars so we struck a deal and I now have two cafe lounge cars and one day nighter which means that I now have a fairly plausible train using my F units which are some of my favorite trains and so when I started going through my boxes and pulling out the equipment I realized I had a greater variety of cars and engines than I'd previously remembered and part of the reason for that is up until recently I haven't had a very good way to store most of what I own um on my old layout I put what I want to run on the layout pack everything into their jewel cases um and put them in a box under the layout so a few months ago my neighbor threw away um an IKEA chest of drawers um that's a couple feet wide and a couple feet deep and has six skinny drawers in it so I picked it up off the side of the road I cleaned it up and it's now my consist storage area i want to line the trains with some foam core and I also want to add some sort of little divider so that things are a little more protected um as it stands now when you pull the door open things sort of rattle and shake so for the time being I'm laying everything on their sides but that said once I started putting trains in there I realized I had a great collection of it and I decided one of the things I wanted to do was turn those into dedicated consists so this layout isn't designed for switching operations it's a passenger routing layout so in the spirit of passenger trains I like to have a collection of different consists over different eras that I can run but that said I do want to have some consistencies on the consists themselves so the combination of engine and passenger cars is plausible so I cataloged all the engines and cars that I had and I arranged them by plausible eras and on the VR rail side of my passenger equipment I now have seven dedicated consists that I can run depending upon my mood and the era I want to show luckily V Rail continues to just combine any cars they seem to have in the yard so you get these wonderfully eclectic mixes of different car styles and eras so combining the different LRC and bug cars that I have on hand I've come up with seven dedicated consists and I've spent a bit of time and I've named them so the consists that run on my layout today are the Canadian the remnant the unity the border service the corridor express the corridor select and the transcore so as I've said I've been running all these new consists and working on the layout and losing myself to time so what I've worked on this past month that is the big change is my elevated city platforms so in front of me here is my newly elevated city platform my version of Union Station descends underneath the city so the open air passenger platforms head under the city through a large arched portal and the theory is is that the station sits at top that and stairwells and elevators make their way down to the platform base this is a feature I've spent a lot of time thinking about and gone back and forth on how I was going to construct it so I've decided that all of the platforms in elevated city areas will be made out of XPS foam uh it is moisture and humidity stable but what I've done is I have faced everything with 1 and 1/2 mm um laser cut plywood so I've created a large portal for the passenger platforms to head through and then I echoed that shape and design and created a retaining wall that is visible for almost half the layout so when I first introduced the design of this layout I did talk about how it was admittedly large first of all the layout sits quite high and it's also roughly 4 ft deep in its widest areas and that offers a series of particular challenges in being able to get to parts of the layout and in that introductory video I talked about how I wanted to make things modular and the fifth and final takeaway from this layout is that I need it to be more modular now I don't mean modular in terms of being able to pick the entire layout and move it what I mean is that each of the scenes that are on the layout need to be able to be done at the workbench so what I've done is that the city as well as the retaining wall that travels along the backside of the layout is broken into two-ft sections that I can remove from the layout and take back to the workbench so this means that everything that I want to work on in scenic and detail is not done on the layout which means that I'm not standing on stools and I'm not reaching and leaning all day long the back wall is made up of six of these individual retaining blocks and as they move along the layout to what's going to be my version of the Baurst Bridge they start to step down a little bit each of these blocks are about 110 mm deep and that's divided between a roadway and then a building platform the last few blocks have been stepped down a little bit um because I needed a lower elevation for the future bridge that goes at the end of this first area and that bridge which is my version of the bathroom's bridge will be one of the next projects that I'm going to work on as mentioned all of these blocks are constructed out of foam and the laser cut plywood and one of the real benefits of that sort of construction was that when I was making the portals for the front of the city um they are on an angle which means you need to cut the portal openings on an angle and what I was able to do was simply glue the plywood portal openings onto the plywood and then using a very inexpensive hot wire cutter I was able to use that as a guide to shape the archways and so I've got a clean archway that's set at about a 35° angle passing through 2-in thick foam now I'm certainly going to need to do some sanding a little more detail work but it was a very straightforward way for me to create an otherwise awkward shape i haven't completely resolved how I'm going to resolve the fascia that goes around the end of the city um I absolutely am going to be putting some sort of viewing portal in so that as I'm backing trains into the station I can move myself around to the back of the layout and I can eye them as they come in and they hit their bumpers and to that point I've gone down a bit of a rabbit hole when it comes to these little handheld throttles that I put together this has become a little bit of a passion project um it's a little off the beaten path what most people would be doing but I've had a lot of fun figuring out how to make these work more effectively and I'm going to be following up this little part of the project very soon um it involves so many other details that I didn't expect I would be including into um simple control units so how am I going to divide my time in the coming weeks um well some of the things off the top of my head that I want to deal with is that I definitely want to get my bridges roughed out and put in place um I have three of those I need to install there's going to be an elevated city with two bridges coming off of it and then it will be framed by some hilly mountainous regions and although I do want to jump into taking care of some scenery and definitely getting some structures built um I feel like if I can just get the final building blocks put in place the retaining walls the bridges and some of the first indications of where there's going to be roadways I'll feel a lot more comfortable jumping into the scenery because I'll be able to come down see the layout in its totality and understand where all the major structural blocks are i am thrilled with my progress the layout is finally starting to look like a city and it's been really inspirational because now I can start to see all of the little areas that I can create some narratives and add some buildings and how to do some scenery work and I'm really looking forward to jumping into that so there you have it a totally chaotic layout update um things are going well i'm really happy with how things are turning out thank you for stopping by i appreciate the support and I'll see you next time [Music]