Track, meet base. Base, meet track.

After all was said-and-done, the track is now attached to the base and is functional.

I had some momentum going and decided to attach the track to the base. I figured once that was done I could move onto scenery and storytelling, which are the things I'm most interested in.

If you read the post on making the wood base you may remember that the foam sheet for the track to sit on fits snuggly down into a frame made by the box's walls. Meaning, the foam sits about 1/4" into the box, and the edges of the wood walls need some foam pieces to extend them to be level with what will be the top of the layout. The photo above shows a foam extension being fitted to one of the walls.

Cutting and fitting the four foam extensions isn't anything exciting, it's just some careful work. Up there is what it looks like when finished. Transfer tape was used to bond the pieces to the foam slab.

With that bit of backlog work done I moved onto soldering power leads to the track. Ok, I admit what I do power-lead-wise is a bit of overkill, but I like to have a few leads connected to a few pieces of track; every piece if I can manage it. The idea is not to rely completely on the rail joiners to conduct power to all the track. In this situation I chickened out and didn't solder leads to the switch, but to the siding so that it could be switched off for parking a second loco.

The track is just tacked in place with some pieces of transfer tape. Once ballast is applied, the track will be stuck down for good.

I did test the track by taking the little green Schöma loco out for a few laps, powering the track with a 9 volt battery pressed against a pair of leads. It ran just fine.

I haven't decided how I'm going to organize all the wiring, the control panel, or power and control for sound and lights, so I just wrapped up the power leads and temporarily taped them to a wall.

Now that the biggest utilitarian job is done my mind is free to think about story and scenes. In that light, Galen reminded me a garden needs compost, and a community garden railway would certainly need some sort of freight car to deliver compost to plots. I had just the thing: I dug up an old N-scale hopper I had on the shelf. It needs some repainting, and some sort of coupler to hook it to the loco, but I see a compost car hidden in all its N-scaleness. 

Stay tuned!