Foldaway mountains

I'm thinking a lot about layouts these days and came across some photos of the first layout I built upon returning to the hobby after being absent for a couple of decades. 

These photos, and the layout, date from around the summer of 2002. There was some gloppy stuff on one - semi-dried adhesive from an old photo album - that smeared on the scanner as it went though. I think the scanner is now hosed :-( 

Anyway, the track plan was based on the Lake District Ry. that appeared in Kalmbach's 101 Track Plans for Model Railroaders. 

The flip-up stand was built from the design discussed in Francis X. Klose's Design for a foldaway layout published in the Nov '74 issue of Model Railroader. I'd been fascinated by Mr. Klose's design since I'd read about it in the '70s. Since the layout was going to be in the workshop, and the workshop can't accommodate a large permanent layout*, this seemed like a good time to build the fold away support.

The support and the layout both worked well. The problem was that I was discovering that I rather liked making miniature buildings, and this layout didn't provide much room for any. So, I disassembled the layout in November 2008, keeping the support's wooden 6'x5' flip-top table, as well as the rolling stand. Those components became the basis of a crude switching layout that was to represent a freelanced small town in Ontario: 6' x 5' = 30 square feet, so it was 30 Squares of Ontario. All this and more was the subject of my very first post :-)

Speaking of layouts and mountains. My last layout in my parent's house in the '70s was to be a modular one. I was infatuated with an article I had read about casting mountain scenery from home-made latex and gauze molds, so I thought a small modular shelf layout would be good for playing with those methods.

I built one module with plaster rocks cast from molds I made and had a second module started. Real-life was kicking in, so those got moved aside, and eventually trashed. No doubt there was some residual love for rocks and mountain scenery that got me working on the 2002 layout.

*I never seem to learn. One of the main reasons I'm disassembling the Ocean Park Line is that when all the modules are connected together, it's too big to keep assembled in the workshop for any period of time without it becoming a nuisance. It's predecessor, the Lost Ocean Line, was a compact, self-contained layout, which I think made it more fun to build, use, and show-off. Hopefully with the new - and yet still unnamed - Mark II version I'll have designed out Mark I's limitations and have kept its good features.