Constructing The Baseboard
The baseboard is of open frame construction of 70mm x 19mm standard dressed pine with 6mm MDF to support the track bed. The rest of the scenery will be constructed on thick sheets of Styrofoam which will be removable to allow me to build them off board.
This is the wood work plan from XtrkCad which I used as a rough guide. Software can't tell you how to do carpentry, unfortunately, but it does print a handy list telling you approximately how much wood you'll need.
This is the baseboard frame being constructed....
A mitre clamp holds two pieces of wood at right angles so I can drill two guide holes for the screws.
I screwed lengths of wood to the wall for the baseboard frames to rest on which I also screwed to the walls. I had a stud finder to locate studs to screw into. One of them turned out to be a water pipe though.
Since the layout is in a main living area of the house I thought I should attempt to make it look at neat as possible. Hence the use of a leg from Ikea rather than a trestle or a plain piece of wood. Four of these extendable legs cost $80 AU. It's cheaper than a Peco point!
This is the woodwork part of the baseboard essentially complete with the track bed raised above the baseboard on several risers. I used the full size track plan as a guide to cut the MDF to the shape of the track at the front of the layout and then constructed the frame for this directly on to it. This allows the landscape at the front (a sea front) to drop lower than the track.
