After finishing up today’s painting and putting down some more mold-a-scene, I took a gander at my staging setup to see how I can do the power.  Once again, I thought “How could do this better without these big cassettes? How could get the trains down to a staging level?”

And then it hit me.  I remember reading an article in an issue of the Model Railroad Hobbyist magazine where Charlie Comstock built a left up section on his railroad to access an area back against the wall.  He used drawer tracks for his design, so he just pushes and raises up the section.  You can see it on Page 101 of Issue #2. There’s a video showing how it all works too.

So using this idea I thought I could build a manual lift using drawer slides, one mounted to the wall and one under the layout.  I’ll secure a wood mount to the slides so I can attach one of my 6′ aluminum channels to it, but also be able to remove it when not in use. I think a bolt through the channel and mount with a wingnut will do.

A new lower level will be installed with 6 staging tracks using Kato Unitrack. A train will pull into the staging left. I would have to manually swap engines from one end of the train to another in order to turn it and I would then lower it down to staging. I would then pull the train up into the staging yard to park it on a dead-end track. When I’m ready to run it again, I would (slowly) back the train up onto the lift and then raise it to either the upper or lower deck.

It still has its cons:   The lift channel is still limited to 6′, and I’ll have to swap locos from one end to another to “turn” a train, but it’ll save my the hassle of having to move those channels across the room to the wall and eliminate the chance of something hitting the floor (or me banging the channel into something).

Shaun Previous Layout