Construction Begins!

Vicksburg Terminal - 1st Footprint

Initial progress on building my first Vicksburg Terminal model railroad is slow at best - baby steps...  A large part of the delay is conceptualizing in my head how I want it to come together.  Over the last several weekends I have spent some time with my father making taking the first steps.

This will be a ceiling railroad with the main level barely clearing the tops of the two doors in the room. I needed a clear picture of where the studs were in the wall to finalize the location of the major structural components.

So we put the new stud finder to work and mapped the walls. The Precision Sensors Profinder 5000 stud finder that I grabbed at Costco is extremely easy to use.

For quick marking, we used sticky note sheets to mark the studs, angling them to mark the center with the bottom corner.  Two walls of the man-cave are external house walls and the studs are spaced 16 inches apart.  The other two walls have studs 24 inches apart.  Hmmm......

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I made several design templates on graph paper of the room and made a number of copies to aid the design process.  We marked the stud locations in orange on one of these sheets to paint the picture of what we had to work with.  This was very helpful to me.

Today, 2-27-2016, was an important day - the first pieces of wood were cut and installed on the north wall.  These pieces define the bottom edge of the main level which will rest on top of this support. Additional segments of 1x4 were cut in 7-inch lengths to aid the mounting of Everbilt 12 inch white Magnum Shelf Brackets that will also support the railroad.

Chris