Who put all that stuff in the TRAIN room?

On Wednesday, I took a reprieve from working in the evening (which is how I’ve spent most of January) to take in a work session chez my friend Scott Calvert. He indicated I should bring my soldering iron.

When I went to retrieve it, I found an impassible pile of detritus in front of my desk. The soldering iron was virtually buried. I texted a photo to Scott to say I may not be able to get the iron, to which he responded “Who put all that stuff in the TRAIN room?”

The rather sheepish answer is, “I did.”  Actually, that stuff has always been in the train room, just on the other side.

That side of the train room has always been an embarrassment, and I really would have liked to have had it finished before 28 strangers toured the layout in November. Then I really would have liked to have had it finished before my brother came in December, but well, that’s a busy time too.

Finally, I took advantage of a lull and Ikea’s January kitchen sale to order a pile of cabinets to neatly nearly fill that void where the crawlspace starts. Everything that will eventually live in those cabinets had to get out of the way; thus the stuff in the TRAIN room. The carcasses went together today, and I should be able to get them all screwed in place tomorrow.

The really great thing about building all these cabinets is that I should be able to clear out the heavy shop, which has been a storage zone since the renovation started five (!) years ago.  There are yet more cabinets to build, but once they’re done, the drill press can move inside, and I can get the long-awaited lathe to work on locomotive wheels.  So you see, these cabinets are really part of the locomotive project.