This post is just to show some work I have done in foam. I am no where near an expert but there are a couple details that really came out nice. The foam panels I used were 2 inches thick and 24 x 48 in size. They came free from a friends roofing company where they were used to protect the industrial roof from the wheels on the small "Bobcat" tractors that drove around on the roof to distribute gravel. I used a hacksaw blade for lack of anything better to cut the front third off the tile, on an angle, so that piece could be flipped and rotated and laid across the back of the tile to double the hight of the back half of the layout, as well as make the layout fit on top of two dressers in my Aunt's bedroom. The finished layout is therefore 18 inches deep and 4 inches high, and since I used three full tiles, the layout is 12 feet long. The layout was built primarily to show off the few trains that she had from a yard sale as well as her ceramic village. I left enough space between the front track and the base of the rear hill for the buildings. notches cut on the bottom of the rear hill allow the power wires from all the buildings to feed to a channel cut along the back of the layout and eventually into two 6 outlet surge protector strips. On of the strips is plugged into a Christmas tree extension cord with a switch in it designed to be stepped on, and the second surge protector is plugged into the first, giving a total of 11 usable outlets. I know this is not something you are supposed to do but the bulbs are 4 watts each, and there are 10 of them, so there certainly is no way I would overload the protector strips or the extension chord. The only other thing connected is the transformer for the lower track. Most of her village pieces are water related, such as a boat shop, a bait shop, a restaraunt called the Blue Marlin, and a lighthouse, so there HAD to be a water feature. The rear hill was cut in half and the ends were cut into a step shape to match the heights of some bridge supports from a cheap train set, you know the sort. I had intended to load images in this post but at this point my wife realized that there are user galleries, so all the images are there. The link is http://www.trainboard.com/railimages/showgallery.php/cat/500/ppuser/9138 I hope you've enjoyed another long winded post by Mike, from DieCastoms.
