March 2010 Status - An Urban Station, almost
Another month, and it seems like there isn’t much to show for it. That’s somewhat deceptive as many things have been accomplished, but nothing has been finished, and that makes it seem like less was done. I’ve covered most of this already, so I’ll quickly summarize:
The supports (all 44 of them) for the elevated station have been built, painted and screwed in place. They can be removed if necessary to work on them (and some of them may be permanently removed and replaced with buildings as I scenic the area under the viaduct). The pink foam was also painted gray to serve as an interim road surface, although something else will eventually be placed atop it. I still need to finish the supports, and then I can begin work on the street surface, the tracks, and the station building itself. Not to mention the “urban” part of the Urban Station scene. This is described in an updated Phase 2d construction page.
The fascia panels for both the Urban Station and the Riverside Station scenes have been cut and painted, and plexiglass panels acquired which fit between the fascia and the table structure, to provide a see-through barrier to prevent trains from leaving the table-top in a derailment.
All of the cork roadbed presently in place (for the subway, and the River Crossing section of the upper lines) has been painted gray, to make it blend in with the unitrack without any ballasting. The Woodland Scenics Track-bed foam for the elevated station has also been painted gray (see the Roadbed page for details) and is waiting for the elevated station to be ready for it.
One last bit: I revisited my lighting system for the tables, and added UV filters to the lights due to concerns about UV from the fluorescent tubes I’m using. This may be unnecessary, but better safe than sorry. Actually “added” is the wrong tense; I’ve done about half of them so far.
The real news is that I’ve decided to add something else to the Urban Station scene: a tram line with an articulated light-rail vehicle, making it even more of an intermodal transportation hub. See the Tram Line page for a possible (but not final) track plan and a picture of the prototype tram. And if you want to know a bit about Trams in Tokyo, see my prototype Trams page. I also have a couple more trains on order, and by the time they arrive I’ll hopefully have the subway track back together to I can break them in (and play with them a bit).
I’ve added some links related to Tomix FineTrack and MiniRail (the sharply-curved subset of FineTrack) to my Links page as well, so if you’re curious about this alternative to Unitrack you can learn a bit more.
And that’s it for now. I’ll have some photos of the new tram and tram line sometime in the next week or so, and that will probably be the next update.
