Jay and I have been spending most of our time working on these buildings. Actually, Jay has been spending most of his time working on these buildings. I’ve had other things going on so I haven’t been able to get down there in over a week.

While painting buildings, though, Jay has been trying to figure out just how he wants his layout to look. He knows that he wants a yard with lots of side tracks and that there also has to be some kind of incline and raised track around the back.

Jay did all of the math to figure out how much room he would need to build the incline while allowing for the least amount of struggle for the length of trains that he wants to run. He then designed his support structure and cut it out of balsa using his CNC laser cutter. To make the radius he also used his CNC laser cutter to cut the black foam board that he had purchased for the bed of the incline.

Here you can kind of see the gentle incline that he has put into place in Section 1 of the layout. He tested it to make sure that the trains would be able to climb the grade and so far, so good!

The top of the incline is only 3″ tall, but that’s about all we have room for on this layout. That’s okay, though, because it at least gives a new dimension to the layout so that it won’t look so flat. Apparently we are going to make this into a bit of a hill or something. That ought to be interesting!