Category: Los Angeles Junction Railway

After the initial false start, I finally wrapped up the floating bench work construction.   Often, the impact of our layout environment rarely reaches the level of conscious awareness.  However, a clean execution of the bench work and room environment sets a tone that enhances the entire experience of interacting with a layout.  It makes us want […]

For the fascia I needed something that was both stiff and hard but also relatively light. Styrene is too dimensionally unstable, traditional molding or MDF was too heavy.   A trip through The Home Depots molding aisle turned up what I needed, 2 1/2 inch by 1/4 inch thick “lattice”.  After carefully cutting it to […]

  Occam’s Law can be summed up with the adage K.I.S.S.  In other words, the best solution is typically the simplest.  Simple doesn’t mean easy to design.  Often the opposite is the case.  It takes a fair amount of thought to come up with the cleanest approach.  Whenever I find myself using the proverbial duct […]

Following my last post on floating bench work, I received a number of emails wondering if the torque imparted on the hollow wall anchor would rip it out of the wall.  The design of the Hillman anchor takes this into account.  That, in combination with a large washer screwed tightly against the front face of […]

For the layout of East 38th Street’s junction railway I want a cleaner, sleeker design when it comes to the benchwork. Traditional shelf brackets work fine but they’ve always struck me as a little clunky, especially when the layout is in a living area or den. It’s a little hard to move them around or […]