I’ve been making some fairly good progress on the layout these past several weeks.  The mainline track has been completed through the Willis yard and is now about halfway around the orb of the peninsula at the west end of Willis.  Eight feet of sub-roadbed (table top in this instance) has been installed at the east end of Monterey.  The hidden staging track for the Texas and Pacific will emerge onto the layout and connect at this section of benchwork.  There’s about a ten foot span remaining between the two benchwork sections now completed at each end of the Monterey area.  I’ll get to that in the next few weeks.

Space in this corner of the layout is pretty tight.  During the installation of the joists and risers for this section, I found it necessary to adjust the location of several joists to facilitate enough access to fasten them to the L-girders.  More about this below.

The plywood/Homasote table top just installed here will contain a pop-up (lift) section.  This will be needed so that I can access the tail track of the wye planned for this area.  The first thing I did after temporarily clamping the table top in place was to lay out all the trackage here.  I then marked out the location of the hole required for the pop-up.  After doing this, I decided to check the future locations underneath for the Tortoise turnout motors that I’d be using.  Surprise!

There are twelve switches in this section.  Two of them have the switch rod (the throw bar) located above risers.  Four more are very close and may require moving or modification of the risers.  Rats!

I had carefully laid out the locations of joists and risers on paper, taking into account the locations for the Tortoises below.  But I conveniently forgot about all this great planning while gleefully sliding the joists about to make fastening them easier.  At least the required adjustments will be simpler to make since I’ll be removing the table top to cut out the hole for the pop-up.

And so it goes.  But despite the setback, I still got a step further out in the long run!

-Jack