Northeast Container Mockup 2

This weekend I spent some time to finish the Northeast Container Mockup.  I decided my first pass at the mockup wasn't tall enough.  Phil (UP6903) on the Atlas O forum suggested that the building should have a foundation that was the same height as the loading dock, so I tried raising the whole building up by that much using some temporary blocks cut to the right height.

Up on blocks

I left it that way for a couple weeks to see if it still seemed like a good idea after I got used to it.  And it did.  So I made a less precarious foundation with some poplar ripped to the right size, with a little rabbit for the 1/4" ply building to sit in.  The foundation is screwed to the bench work - I wanted to keep the building accurately positioned but still removable.  I'm not sure that was the right choice, but I'm not sure it was the wrong choice either.  Perhaps time will tell.

The foundation

The above photo shows the rabbit on the foundation.  It's screwed down with Kreg pocket screws through slightly over-sized holes, which let me tweak the position slightly before the final turn or two on the screw.  The screw eyes in the top edge are to hook rubber bands on to hold the building in place.

High tech hold downs

The little metal thing the rubber band is looped through on the wall is for picture hanging, it's got two little spikes that you drive into the wood to hold it in place.  Here's the main building in place.  I gave it a quicky paint job with a spray can.

Main building

And the finished mockup with the loading dock in place, and some 1/16" paneling for a roof.

Finished mockup

The whole structure is slightly over 11 feet long - the main building is 64", the narrower pieces is 72".  I'm pretty happy with the overall footprint and size of the building.

An overview

You may be wondering why the backdrop doesn't go all the way down to the layout at the right end of the build.  At the time I put the backdrop up, the plans called for a solid series of smaller warehouse like buildings up against that wall.  I found I was short a sheet of full width masonite for the backdrop, but I did have a sheet that would go down below the roofline of the buildings.  And ever since the plan changed I've regretted that "clever" time and money "saving" move.  I'm toying with the idea of using photo backdrops for a tree line, which would cover up that problem and possibly solve the white window shade problem at the same time.

A closer view

As you can see from the hi-cube peeking out of the warehouse door, the height is about right now.  I think the color is somewhere in the general neighborhood of what I want, but it's definitely not right.  I'm also having second thoughts about the peak in the roof.  Putting it there tells you how wide the building is (twice the distance from the front to the peak), and that's clearly not as big as it should be.  And I think the pitch of the roof is a bit steeper than the effect I was going for.  For now it gets the idea across, gives guests a sense of what the purpose of the operation is, and lets me put off worrying about a building a better version of it for quite some time.

The building mockup with it's roof in place will also let me test another things over time - how to deal with uncoupling a cut that gets spotted in the building.  A couple experiments suggest that with the kadee 805 couplers, it's reasonably easy to uncouple a car placed just inside the building by angling the skewer in through the top of the door.  I don't have enough cars converted to kadees yet though to get an idea of how that will really work out in an op session.

Looking back at the photos it occurs to me that I should explain the yellow things on the track.  Those are yellow sticky note pieces in a new set of experiments with marking clearance points.  My first pass at the experiment used a number I got from a CSX document stating that the clearance point was the point at which the two nearest rails were 13 feet apart.  Using that number on my layout looked good, but ate up a little too much track length for a layout that already suffers a little from too short tracks.  The new number I'm trying is 8 feet between the two nearest rails.  That leaves a little over two scale feet between cars, and adds a car to the capacity of several tracks.  Once I'm sure where I want the clearance points to be I'll follow the prototype practice of marking the rail or tie with some yellow paint.