Building Multi-Level Model Train Benchwork

Welcome to Nickel Plate country. This is an HO model of the New York, Chicago & St. Louis, better known as the Nickel Plate Road's line to St. Louis. This is the end St. Louis part, and I've modeled the part right near the Indiana-Illinois state line from Frankfort, Indiana, Division Point Yard, to Charleston, Illinois, halfway to St. Louis, 111 miles. Now, modeling 111 miles, even in Z scale in here would be a bit of a push, and in HO, it's certainly a big hunk of railroad to model, but by doing it on two decks, I've actually managed to double the amount of railroad I can build. I got about 250 feet of main line, which is somewhere in the neighborhood of four scale miles on one deck, and by corkscrewing around the room twice, and starting here and winding up here, I've managed to get almost eight scale miles, 500 feet of main line. The minute you add a second deck, you've gotta come to grips with a couple of very obvious points once you get into it, and that is that you're really building two model railroads, one right above the other, and therein lies a problem. When you put the second deck in there, you immediately shade the lower deck from any ceiling light fixtures you have, and if you have 'em mounted in the aisles, you're still gonna be shadowing it as the light comes in here. So the first consideration you need to worry about is having a lighting source underneath the upper deck for the lower deck. Now, a friend of mine says he was gonna use white rope lights, and I told him, "Good luck with that, you probably are gonna discover that you can only put out, they only put out enough light to find 'em in the dark." He said he was gonna use three strings to add more light. He now has a lot of white rope lights for sale very cheap if you're interested. They just don't put out enough light. Christmas tree bulbs is a solution some people use. Some of them like them, I'm here to tell you they don't work. They're just too dim. And incandescent bulbs in general are very red, so unless you're modeling the arid Southwest, I'm not sure you want to go that way. The real solution is gonna be light emitting diodes. They're very close, they're on the market today. The price will come down year after year after year, one day soon, that'll be the way we do everything. Right now, fluorescents are probably the way to go. Now, we've only got, let's say about three inches to play with up here, because as I show you with a tape measure, the spacing between the top of the lower deck and the top of the upper deck happens to be about 16 inches, the same spacing as studs in a stud wall. But the clearance between the two decks here is only 13 inches. Now, there's a place on my railroad that it's only 10 inches, in fact, and that's starting to push it. That's starting to get to be pretty cozy underneath there. So the closer you get to 15, 16 inches, probably the better you are, and the narrower this can be up a point, the better you're gonna be. Now, you don't want this to be zero thickness, because this is a picture frame. This frames this picture, this frames this picture, so you don't want zero thickness, but you don't want much more than about three inches of thickness, or you're starting to screen your slope distance, the slant view right down in here. So one of the considerations is not only the thickness of the upper deck, but the thickness of the lighting. Now, foam is a popular material for people to use today to build model railroads, and it's a great material to use, the pink or the blue stuff, not the white. The white's a very crumbly type of foam. And you can see that we've already chewed up most of the thickness that we have available to us in this about a 3 1/4 inch fascia here. Now, you don't want the fascia, which is the valance for the lower deck, to be zero thickness, because it's a picture frame. This is framing this picture, and it's also helping to frame this picture. But by the same token, you've gotta get lighting up in here. But I think you can see here that we've used up most of our allotted three inches or so, and there's not much room under here for light. Now, there is a little bit of room, and I'll show you one solution, but if we look at this and remember about where that came and we compare that to the thickness of a standard fluorescent undercabinet fixture, which is about 1 3/4 inches thick here. Now, this would mount like this underneath here, and you can see that we've used up quite a bit of our thickness, just in the lighting fixture. Now, what can we do to accommodate that? Well, the first thing we can do is what I did, and that is I've used 3/4 inch plywood for the upper deck. And you can see that that has not eaten up much of our allocated distance at all. I've got a lot of room in here for that 1 3/4 inch fixture, and then a little bit more so you don't see the edge of it. I'll show you in just a second how I hold this up, but I want to show you another solution, and that is that there are lighting fixtures that are as thin as one inch. And this is a way that you might be able to use these with the foam, but you couldn't really fasten these to the foam, so you probably want to bond a thin luan plywood to the foam, and then fasten these to the luan plywood. And you've gotta be a little bit careful, if you look at this fixture, it has metal front and a metal back, and that's very bad for lighting a model railroad, because the light is only gonna come down. It's not gonna go into your backdrop. So when you're buying these fixtures, you want to look for a fixture that looks like this, and this has the open front, so a clear plastic lens comes up and then bends over and goes back down. This lets light go in all directions. So you would mount this this way, so some of the light goes onto the backdrop and some of it comes down. Now, as you can see, we have different lengths of fixtures, and here's some that are still in the box, but it makes the point because you can read 13 inch and 18 inch. When you come to a curve at the end of your peninsula or the end of your bench work, I've had remarkably poor success bending fluorescent lights. Even if you heat 'em up, they just don't bend well at all. The solution is you get 24 inch or 18 inch or 13 inch, and you put them kind of like cars in a freight train. Just they bend, you know, freight trains go around curves, so lighting can go around curves the same way. So that takes care of those kind of problems. Now, question is, let's go back to the plywood that I had. How do you hold the plywood up? What I use are very inexpensive metal brackets. These are just the stamped metal brackets. They cost, you know, a buck and a quarter or something like that. And I slide them up behind the sky backdrop. In other words, the brackets go first, and they're screwed into the studs, so they're very, very strong, and then they come out and support the plywood, but you have to leave about five inches out here at the end, where the fluorescent fixtures go. Don't forget about the fluorescent fixtures. So you would probably want to take the long side down and the short side out and mount it that way. If this platform, this is 16 inch width, down here in the town area, it is two feet wide to accommodate the town scene a little bit. Here I would probably want to mount it, if this were the upper deck, I'd want to mount it the long way out to get more support. So either way it works, just keep in mind what you're doing. All of this is a little bit complicated to take in, so let me just point out that "Model Railroader" has a book that I wrote, called "Designing and Building Multi-Deck Model Railroads." All of the details, from design, how we got here from there, operation, every scenic consideration, everything you can think about is in this book.