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| Overview of the Memorial Avenue section with the scene sketched out. |
Inspired by the trip up to The Big E over the last week, I've been working on the Memorial Avenue section of the layout. The scene is fairly simple with the four lanes of Memorial Avenue crossing the spur, the driveway for the Gate 9 entrance, and a small commercial building. The first step was to add the trim around the sides of the modules to hold in the scenery. The topography in this area has the spur at the low point of the scene. This means that all of the trim is added to the top of the module with the scenery graded down towards the spur. I took the time to cut all of these pieces to match the eventual finished contours and nailed them in place.
The next step was to start adding in the scenery base. For the road, I decided to use cork as the base. I choose this because it matched the exact heights for the roadbed under the track (obviously) but also to add in curbing and catch basins in later steps. Foam could be an option but I felt it would be difficult to keep the lines straight. The cork allows everything to be a bit more exacting than trying to work the grading by hand.
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| Cork placed for base of road. |
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| First level of cork glued and tacked in place. |
I filled the area of the road and sidewalks with a single layer of cork roadbed. This was simply glued in place with carpenters glue. The next step was to add two layers of cork to the areas where the sidewalks will eventually be. These two pieces of cork match up exactly with the height of the curbing which will be placed at the edge of the roadway.
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| Cork for sidewalks added as well as some foam for the adjacent hills |
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| Curbing for the road. |
All of the curbing was cut and fitted on each side of the road. Then all of the pieces were glued into place. It took about 14 sections of straight curbing and two sections of 6' radius curbing for the driveway entrance of the commercial building to complete the roadway. In addition, a catch basin was also added on the north side of the street.
The final step was to glue a final layer of cork roadbed down along the base of the road. This brings the height of the road just shy of the rail height - enough room so that a thin layer of joint compound can be added for the road surface in the future. This will happen once I have the foundation finished for the commercial building in the next couple of weeks. In the meantime, it's starting to look like a road.
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| Curbing and catch basins installed. Cork to raise road to rail height started on the left. |
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| Base for road complete. Ready for final road surface. |
