Groundwork

Now that you’ve been introduced to the project. Let’s get along and start.
Firstly, the baseboard.
You recall how I saw the old shelf in the corner of the garage. I quickly measured things up and marked them out. Confirming that it would all fit.

After a quick trip to the DIY store to get some supplies. I framed the shelf with some 2” x 1” pine.
I could have laid track directly onto the board but having seen pictures of the locale, I decided it was important to get some of that scenic grandeur onto the 4’ x 11” shelf if I could. So I laid some 1 1/2” thick polystyrene foam onto it and then faced that with cork tiles. This gives a firm, level surface to lay the track onto. It’s a method I’ve used several times before and I’m very happy with it. This arrangement then sat under weights for a few hours whilst the liquid nails adhesive set.

Once set. The cork was trimmed and the baseboard moved into the model railway room (my basement) to begin construction.

Baseboard marked up

The shelf framed, framed and corked and ready to build on

But not so fast...
There’s still a lot of thought that you can put into even the simplest of schemes to give them a little boost. Take the positioning of the buildings for example. Look at the photos below.

Look at the positioning of the buildings.

I mocked up the positions of the buildings using some good sized boxes. Buildings at these sorts of  sizes would work. But take a closer look at their positions. In photo “A”  the tramway line passes through the front of the large building, and into the rear of the smaller one. In photo “B” the line passes through the front of them both. There is a vastly different feel to the pictures. To me, the scene as depicted in photo “A” feels much deeper than that in photo “B”. It’s less two dimensional and more “dynamic”.
Then there is the direction of travel of the trains to take into consideration. If at all possible, I try to avoid having trains travel across the scene parallel to the front and/or rear of the baseboards. You can see in the track drawing on the shelf at the top of the post, how the track is angled from the rear corner  to the front corner. Again, this is less two dimensional and lends greater depth to the scene.
Is that it?
Can I start building now?
I think so. There are probably other things to consider, but I think I could confirm the building sizes and glue the track in place.