Downtown Spur
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Downtown Spur
East Rail

The Downtown Spur model railroad is being built in my basement in the space previously occupied by my N scale Monon layout.  I decided to do some major room clean up and renovation before beginning the new layout.  Demolition of the Monon layout started in November of 2007 and renovation continued through  late spring of 2008.  Bench work on the the new layout finally started going up in June of 2008.

It was important to me to get the mechanical framework in place as soon as reasonably possible.   After the bench work was completed, the foam scenery base was installed.   Rather than start detailed construction immediately I chose two intermediate steps to keep momentum and enthusiasm up. First, temporary Atlas code 83 flex and sectional track was laid over the course of several weekends and wired in place.  This put me in the position of being able to operate the full layout very early on.     The second step I performed prior to starting detail work was to construct photo mock-ups of the key structures.   By the winter of 2008 I had a fully operational layout containing passable visual representations of the key structures and streets.

With trains running and visual stand ins for the structures now in place, I feel the pressure is off.   I can now  proceed at a leisurely pace spending as much time as I want super detailing various areas of the layout.     As I progress with the detailed scenes I'll gradually replace the temporary Atlas code 83 track with more detailed Micro Engineering code 70 track and replace the structure mock-ups  with the actual structure models. 

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