Construction Begins!

I finally have a few photos!

Here's the room where the main part of the layout will be. As you can see, this is a pretty nicely finished room, which means I'll have to be very careful to protect the floor from finish-damaging debris, glue drip and what-not:

I had a work session yesterday (Saturday the 23rd). Five of my model railroading friends from Charleston spent two hours on the road (each way!) to come out and help get the construction ball rolling.

By the end of this first session, we had the Laurel benchwork framing complete and risers installed. We also laid in the first two sheets of plywood at the far end (the wide end) of the peninsula, but I took these photos before we did that. 

This is just a shot sighting down the risers to see if the tops line up reasonably well. I think they do:

And here's my construction crew. Left to right is Allen, Phil, Jim, John and Jimmy. I hope I can convince them to come back again - in four hours we did what would otherwise have taken me weeks to accomplish! They all said they'd be back, but that's as they were all running for their cars before the two hour trip home!

 Thanks, guys!

The basic layout arrangement has now been set (until I change it, anyway!). There have been changes to the NP trackage - I moved Laurel from against the wall over to a peninsula, to allow access to all sides of the 7'-wide tracks and engine terminal. Here's the basic plan:

You can see the new position of Laurel on the NP. Other elements of the track plan are more of the "general arrangement" variety - only the NP is currently detailed.
I think I can fit Lander back into the plan. Initially I thought I would have to leave it out, which would reduce the layout to only one branch (the Cody line), but if I can work out the elevations properly, I'll have a much better operations scheme with both Cody and Lander branches.
I might even be able to fit Lusk (C&NW east staging) back in, positioning it over the turnback curves for NP staging. I'll have to mull that one over a bit...