Before and after views of the East Rail 2 layout room

The bulk of my time since the last update has been spent on cleaning and renovating the East Rail 2 layout room. Photos of me elbow deep with a scrub brush removing asphalt tile adhesive doesn’t make for the most captivating blog posts hence the radio silence. The DC area is prone to basement flooding. About three years ago during a weekend monsoon, about a quarter of an inch of water covered the entire floor, deposited a microfine layer of silt everywhere, and wicked up the studs and baseboards an inch or so. Mess doesn’t begin to describe it. East Rail is located in what was a little used storage and photography room so I’ve been putting off cleaning it up. With the layout coming together, it was time. The mold-laden baseboards were stripped and replaced with pvc (waterproof) ones. The walls were refinished, patched, and repainted. The peeling floor tiles were removed, the floor got a deep clean, and a new coat of concrete paint was applied.

On to more pleasant tasks. I started working on the final scenery pass on the canal side, a step which focused on applying sections of Martin Wellberg’s excellent grass mats. The trick with these is handling the edges. I added a step to his directions. Specifically, after cutting a patch to shape I sprayed them with Super77 spray adhesive and then applied dots of tacky glue over the surface. The mat was put in place and I ran my finger firmly around the edges to push it tightly down. Finally I ran an air thin section of polyfiber around the edges.