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New Year, New Start

Ian Holmes

Entry posted by Ian Holmes

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Another year and I'm going to start off with the best of intentions of keeping a layout building blog going on RMWeb. I haven't done terribly well at that in the past.

To set the scene, in the middle of last year I discovered the APA box from IKEA and presented it as a possible model railway baseboard structure. It's fair to say that many modellers have jumped on the product and are using it. So I thought it was about time I got in on the act.

I was also recently asked to be a part of the Micro Model Railway Cartel blog project. Which has also fired up my enthusiasm for the APA project.

So, when one member of the Cartel recently presented an APA box scheme. It immediately grabbed my attention as it reminded me of several schemes I'd got in my pile of sketchbooks from the past so I adapted it to incorporate some of those ideas.

city_dreams_scheme.jpg

I was interested enough in the idea to reach into my spares box for old structures from previous layouts to verify if my 2D thoughts translated into 3D as well as I thought they would.

IMG_1139.jpg

This first mock up above was enough to convince me that I was very probably right. I could see that the structure on the left was too tall and too dominant . So I reached into the spares box for something lower...

wIMG_1148.jpg

A big improvement on the overall effect I think you'll agree. Using half a car as a view block on the right is also going to work well I feel

So that's where the project sits at this point in the day. As you can see I've cut some holes in the side walls of the box so I think there's really no going back now.

My New Years resolution was to use RMWeb more I'm off to a good start...

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rouse2037

Looking very good so far - i'll be following this!

I have an assembled APA in the railway room waiting for work to begin plus several Pikestuff kits itching to be built!

 

What will you use as a sub base in the box for the track etc to go on Ian?

 

Roger

roG'Ner

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Ian Holmes

Roger:

Thanks for the interest I'm sorry I missed your question yesterday. I've cut a piece of 18mm thick white expanded polystyrene foam to fit inside the base and then covered that with some 2mm thick cork. That still came up slightly short of the required depth to match up with the top of the pine frame. So tonight I've just added a second layer of 2mm cork cut to the shape of the track bed. This is pretty much a perfect match depth wise.

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shortliner

Ian - The "13th Street, Miami" Boxfile layout in the current MTI might work for the group. Although it is N, an HO version may fit in an APA box

Jack

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