Last minute benchwork details.

As of today, Feb. 27, 2012, I'm just about ready to put my toe over the threshold of stepping into ACTUALLY CONSTRUCTING my model railroad!  So close!

My track plan has been "finalized" for 6 years.  Yes, that's human years, not dog years.  And I did say finalized.  I took a couple years to putz with various ideas, in various parts of the basement, then finalized what I wanted.  And it hasn't changed in 6 years.  But nothing more happened since then because of "priorities".  It's the kind of thing when you wish you were a kid again and didn't have any priorities except self-indulgent fun.  But, no profit to live in the past, right?  I'm here, now.  Finally.

This thing is going into our basement, in the space under our family room.  Wall to wall it's a really nice size - about 12 feet by 18 feet.  My track plan calls for the layout to go around the walls.  You'll stand inside this big donut of track in order to run trains.  Kinda cool.

But my uno problemo is the ceiling height.  Our family room was built with a step down from the main floor.  In the basement this means the normally low ceiling height is even lower.  The bottom of the floor joists measure exactly 6 feet from the basement floor.  Tall folks gonna hafta be careful.  And not only that, the heating ductwork hangs below that.  Standing next to them, the bottom of the ducts are right at my chin level.

OK, lets digress to model railroad design.  For a nice experience watching models run, it's a good thing to have them at eye level.  For the one who's running them, and also working switch tracks, they probably want to have the tracks at about shoulder level, perhaps a tad lower like maybe armpit level.  You still are looking across the trains sort of like when watching the real thing, but you can seel well enough downward to see which doggone track it's running on now.  Most people buld their railroads so the tracks are high, like maybe 4-feet to 5 -feet off the floor.  But I don't have the ceiling clearance to do that.

So my idea was to build it low, and people sit in chairs to watch or run trains.  Like a small office chair on wheels.  Not a new idea.  But it solved the low ceiling problem.  And introduced another sort-of-problem.

I have junk.  My wife has junk.  Stuff.  Things.  Family stuff.  Keepsake stuff.  Rainy day stuff.  Of the Way-Too-Much variety.  When you start out into adulthood without two pennies to rub together, you get trained to not throw things away.  We are well trained (no pun......).   So the space under the train layout is pre-designated for storage of stuff.

Therein is the dilema.  If I make the layout low, it's easy to build and easy to watch when running.  If I build it high then our "stuff" will all fit.  It's getting down to a decision involving a couple inches one way or the other.

I'd like to go with a 36-inch height off the floor.  I'm going to try to make that work.  Any taller and it will be a bit hard to see or operate from a chair.  Any lower and various plastic bins won't stack underneath.

Thirty six inches is a standard kitchen countertop height.  I put some train stuff on the counter and sat in a chair.  The view is pretty good.  It's a bit high, but maybe I can find inexpensive office chairs that will raise up a bit.

Problem solved.