Planning and more planning

Will I ever get started on building this layout? Yes - this coming Wednesday, February 24th, is the day.  It's about four months since the day when I decided to start on it.  I've sold virtually all of my postwar stuff and now  have a better idea of my budget.

I always was a planner- planning gives me great enjoyment as try to turn my  imagination into realistic ways to develop and improve my work.  Since my last post, I've done a bunch more of it in a couple of areas as I've progressed clearing the train room to the point where can actually put up the first piece of backdrop.  

Speaking of which, I had another change of mind and have bought 1/8" Masonite panels.  Home Depot cut a couple of 4x8 sheets down the middle so I have four 2x8s .I also bought a 2x4 so I have 36' in total.  I still need some more for the spur but since it's "off-stage', it won't have a printed backscene but just pale blue paint. I may just reuse some panels from the earlier layout.

I worked on a detailed design and drawing for the base frame. (Schematic below)

In the drawing, the green base frame is fixed and level and is just a very basic framework for the  layout segments to rest upon.  The segments are in gray and will slide out when i need to work on them.  I think this will work - I just have to design the sub-panels and make sure they will tuck up under the segments without being in the way of sliding them out. This is going to be critical.  There will need to be PCBs on some of the panels and they're fragile, typically 1 1/2" - 2 1/2" high.  I'll do a rough design then try one out.

I bought some more buildings and I'm a little worried about what seem to be variations in scale between them.  Put Woodland Scenics' Morrison's Door Factory up against a Lionel suburban house and you'll see what I mean.  I'll shuffle the plan around to use these differences to help with perspective but likely I'll need to see what they actually look like when i have some layout to try them out on.

Construction has started! See the next post.

(I wrote most of this post on Monday 2/22 but I'm only getting round to posting it now because I've been progressing construction).