Building a table
When looking at layouts, I already had in mind that I would be placing this in my office on a spare sit/stand desk. My employer leases space in Champaign for the six of us that work remotely. There is some extra space in the break room that a small layout would fit in nicely. The track layout I picked says it will fit in a 38x60 space so it wouldn’t fit directly on the 30x60” tabletop that is there now. I don’t want to mess up the office desk so a platform needs to be constructed.
Ideally the layout would be on a table that is movable and that we can build stuff on and paint and cut into, etc.. Who is this “we” you might ask? We = me and my officemate DOP who likes trains and wants to work on the office train layout. His involvement started with the table construction. I am super happy to have someone to work on this with.
I sketched out this design idea for the table one day based on the size of the sit stand desk and pulling from some article I read about building benchwork. That's where the idea to use 2" expanded polystyrene foam came from.
I sent the sketch to DOP to look over. My workshop isn’t heated and I hate working in the cold but DOP’s workshop is nicely heated and he offered up its use one Saturday. I packed up the 2” 4x8 foamboard I bought and some scrap wood and headed over to his shop. DOP had made a run to
the home supply store and while there he bought all the boards we would need. Much nicer wood than the scrap pieces I was thinking of using. DOP rocks!.
The two of us knocked out that table in less than 2 hours. We were pretty focused on the building and I forgot to take pictures at a regular interval. DOP has some time lapse video I need to get a hold of.
Here are a couple pictures I did remember to take.
I ran the table over to the office and it fit perfectly on top of the sit/stand desk.
So now the starter set is setup on the table in the office. Complete with a temporary “mountain” that DOP threw together a few months ago when I had first setup the starter set in my office
While waiting for the track order to be delivered/sorted out the next steps are to paint the foam some starting color (I was thinking green but DOP suggested a dirty brown and I think brown makes more sense). Maybe paint the frame boards green? We need to make a control panel holder to mount under the table and figure out the DC vs DCC question.
To DC or DCC?
I'm going to wrote down some of my thoughts about this now. I had no idea how controversial this topic is on the various online train forums. Everyone seems to have an opinion and some are aggressive opinions. And here is my opinion: There isn’t any absolute right or wrong answer to this question only what you feel will be the most fun for you. As I think I alluded to above, my leaning is towards DCC. Maybe the SPROG system which uses a raspberry pi for the encoding unit which allows the use of wireless devices as the controller. This is right up our alley. DOP is a network security engineer, I'm a network engineer and we are both jacks of all trades so the opportunity to hack up the system is compelling. One idea we had is to create an officetrain portal where internet users could drive the trains remotely and see video on their screen of the whole layout plus an in-cab
view. But this is something that will have to wait. At least until the basics are done. We don't even have track yet.
When looking at layouts, I already had in mind that I would be placing this in my office on a spare sit/stand desk. My employer leases space in Champaign for the six of us that work remotely. There is some extra space in the break room that a small layout would fit in nicely. The track layout I picked says it will fit in a 38x60 space so it wouldn’t fit directly on the 30x60” tabletop that is there now. I don’t want to mess up the office desk so a platform needs to be constructed.
Ideally the layout would be on a table that is movable and that we can build stuff on and paint and cut into, etc.. Who is this “we” you might ask? We = me and my officemate DOP who likes trains and wants to work on the office train layout. His involvement started with the table construction. I am super happy to have someone to work on this with.
I sketched out this design idea for the table one day based on the size of the sit stand desk and pulling from some article I read about building benchwork. That's where the idea to use 2" expanded polystyrene foam came from.
the home supply store and while there he bought all the boards we would need. Much nicer wood than the scrap pieces I was thinking of using. DOP rocks!.
The two of us knocked out that table in less than 2 hours. We were pretty focused on the building and I forgot to take pictures at a regular interval. DOP has some time lapse video I need to get a hold of.
Here are a couple pictures I did remember to take.
 |
| Laying out the base frame |
 |
| Gluing the foam down in the finished frame |
I ran the table over to the office and it fit perfectly on top of the sit/stand desk.
So now the starter set is setup on the table in the office. Complete with a temporary “mountain” that DOP threw together a few months ago when I had first setup the starter set in my office
While waiting for the track order to be delivered/sorted out the next steps are to paint the foam some starting color (I was thinking green but DOP suggested a dirty brown and I think brown makes more sense). Maybe paint the frame boards green? We need to make a control panel holder to mount under the table and figure out the DC vs DCC question.
To DC or DCC?
I'm going to wrote down some of my thoughts about this now. I had no idea how controversial this topic is on the various online train forums. Everyone seems to have an opinion and some are aggressive opinions. And here is my opinion: There isn’t any absolute right or wrong answer to this question only what you feel will be the most fun for you. As I think I alluded to above, my leaning is towards DCC. Maybe the SPROG system which uses a raspberry pi for the encoding unit which allows the use of wireless devices as the controller. This is right up our alley. DOP is a network security engineer, I'm a network engineer and we are both jacks of all trades so the opportunity to hack up the system is compelling. One idea we had is to create an officetrain portal where internet users could drive the trains remotely and see video on their screen of the whole layout plus an in-cab
view. But this is something that will have to wait. At least until the basics are done. We don't even have track yet.
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