Pizza Ponderings - A Freshly Rolled Base

It started with a sketch... a very small sketch in fact, literally doodled the size of a postage stamp on a scrap of paper. In fact I'm amazed it has scanned and cleaned up so well! It was initially drawn for a circular base but then squared off into an Octagon when I realised the cake board I had to hand was a little warped. It doesn't represent anything in particular, just some narrow gauge track, a building that may have a disconnected track emerging from it, and a tree.

Having procrastinated for a couple of weeks, it was soon getting towards the Easter Weekend. With family visits pushed back into the week after the bank holidays, and various other factors taken into account, I realised I had a window of opportunity to do something practical. 

What follows may be seen by many as over-engineering for a simple pizza, but I wanted to build something robust and without any tendency to warp, and to use materials to hand wherever possible. Construction largely follows the method used for my 009 layout 'The Old Quarry Line', with a 5mm ply base, 13" square as the starting point. 2.5" triangles were cut from each corner to avoid hard corners and bracing is in the form of some timber from stock, about 1" x 0.75", the sort of thing that some appliances come packed with.

Having glued and clamped the basic frame together I added an edging strip all the way around. On the two sides where there isn't a continuous strip across the board underneath this is part of the basic load-bearing structure. I had cut more 5mm ply for this job but this was not satisfactory, so in the end had an  Saturday afternoon dash to Wickes to buy 4 x 36mm pine strip to avoid grinding to a halt on Easter Sunday! 

The pine strip is used on three long and two short sides, the other sides are some 3mm ply that I had to hand, profiled to allow a raise in the scenery.

A layer of 5mm foam core board topped the ply, with cut-outs to allow scenery to dip below the trackbed level, and a layer of cork tile over that to add more depth and provide a good surface for pinning and adjustment whilst laying the track. Both layers were glued down with PVA and weighted whilst drying.

Regular readers may recall that several Easter weekends ago, in the isolated days of 2020, I laid out what was going to be my next O9 project, a now stalled and lifted interpretation of the Julian Andrews/Howard Martin 'Avalon Brickworks' plan. Two thirds of the trackwork laid on this pizza is recovered from the curves on that project, with rail sides cleaned up and broken sleepers removed. It was laid with my home-made 5" radius curve and lightly pinned into place.

 

Two of the rail joiners were pre-wired and some very simple wiring under the board allowed test running on Tuesday morning, with the Motor Rail doing the honours. There is scope to remove a small part of the board on the left hand side to drop the scenery even further but that will wait for another day.  

Whether or not the original plan will be followed remains to be seen, there are a few other options in the archives: Pizza Ponderings - Fresh Toppings and I need to decide if this project is to use the 18" gauge stock currently under development or maybe provide a home for the railcar and luggage trailer.

More soon...