Citrusville micro-layout in n-scale: Week 1 construction progress report

After coming up with the layout concept yesterday construction started. A 4 x 1 ft benchwork box and a 2 x 1 ft benchwork box were built out of 1x4 lumber and 1/4" birch plywood. By building the benchwork as two separate pieces it will be easier to move the micro-layout upstairs from the basement, and to load it in the car. At the end I may end up adding a backdrop and a structure to hold built-in lights.

Once the benchwork was built I moved on to arranging the track on the benchwork, to see if the buildings would fit where I envisioned them in the layout sketch from the concept page.

One of the key buildings that determines if the layout concept works is the fruit packing house on the far end of the layout. This building divides the visible side of the layout from the two staging tracks behind it. I may end up adding a short backdrop behind this building to help hide the staging area. There are some good resources out there capturing many of the interesting structures that served as packing houses. It appears that most people wanting accurate models of the prototype end up scratch building a structure, but with my hope to get this layout built and completed in a few weeks I plan on using DPM's modular brick structure pieces. I built a stand-in paper building to test out the size and look of a potential packing house using DPM's planning templates. The paper template building is 10 modular pieces long and 2 pieces wide. As can be seen in the below photo a two piece wide building is a bit of a tight fit into the space. However, if I slimmed the building down to one piece wide then I feel like it would be unrealistically narrow. This current building can fit four 40 ft reefers at the loading doors. While real packing houses may have likely loaded many more reefers each day, I think four is the most this layout can handle, considering the daily freight from the staging area will only be able to fit four to five 40 ft cars.