Altoona Yard has eleven storage tracks totaling about 71 feet (2.19 scale miles) of track. The yard was fed through a "pivot table", which was a manually operated cross between a quarter turntable and a transfer table. The photo below shows the track ballasted. This was my entire fleet as of January 2003.

Design

The Altoona Yard did not look anything like the real Altoona yard in Pennsylvania - I just liked the name! Hey, it is my model railroad!

This part of my layout was under the main track level. The helix leads into the yard throat. This then leads to the bridge of the pivot table. The pivot table allows access to the eleven storage tracks.

On August 8th, 2002 I started work on the Altoona storage yard benchwork. The diagram to the right shows the benchwork design. It shows a top-down view.

The dashed outline represents the plywood base for the layout. The mildly shaded areas are the 1x4 boards that made up the support framework for the plywood board. The densely shaded rectangles are the slots I needed to cut into the plywood for the board to go around the vertical bracket arms that are installed in the room.

The plywood board was basically a 24-inch (61-cm) wide surface around the wall with some triangular areas added to match the profile of the layout above.

The first photo of the new Altoona yard area was a rough-cut sheet of 1/2-inch (1.25-cm) birch plywood resting on some clamps that were attached to the vertical bracket arms on the wall. The surface was about 36 inches (91 cm) from the floor. This matches the bottom rung of the helix, of course.

I used a plumb bob to mark off the outline of the board, and cut it. The next photo shows the board cut and ready to be installed.

And here was the completed benchwork. The plywood surface was supported on a simple but effective framework made up out of 1 x 4 pine boards. These boards have been attached to the vertical bracket arms that hold up the rest of the layout. There are three of them, so the final construction was rock-solid.

This is a wide-angle shot of the yard area to give you an idea of how far the lower level was away from the upper level. The lower level plywood was cut to match the profile of the upper level.

This photo shows the yard entrance area. The triangular (cone-shaped) area on the right of the photo was part of the support for the track that comes from the helix. This was still under construction and would be finished in the next day or so.

Here you can see the bottom exit of the helix and how it leads to the yard entrance. Some creative woodworking was left to do here to make sure that there was a smooth transition between the helix and the yard.

Next, I installed cork over the plywood. I bought a 4ft x 5ft sheet of 1/8" (121cm x 152cm x 0.3cm) cork. At the art supply store where I bought the cork the sales person recommended that I use Weldbond. I had never used the glue before, but now that I have, I can highly recommend it. The first thing I did was cover the to-be-glued surfaces of both the plywood and the cork with a 5:1 ratio of water to glue. Using a foam brush I applied a thin layer and let it dry overnight. This sealed the surfaces of both materials. The next day I covered the plywood area to be glued with full-strength Weldbond glue and immediately put down the cork. You only get about 20 minutes of working time, but it takes time to apply the glue. After letting it dry overnight again, the cork was permanently attached to the plywood, with no ripples or other quirks. Nice and smooth.

The first step in laying track in this area was to determine how far the individual tracks of the storage yard needed to be apart from each other. I settled on one-inch (2.54cm) spacing between the tracks. I marked off where the tracks' edges were going to be. I decided to lay the track parallel to the front edge of the layout surface. This front edge was at an angle to the back wall. This made the angles of the curves a bit smoother.

This photo shows the first 11 pieces of flextrack drying after having been glued to the cork sub-roadbed. I used Liquid Nails for Foamboard glue, which was spread thinly over the area where the track was to be installed. Using various tools I tried to get the track as straight as possible. Did you know that eleven pieces of 3-foot long flextrack add up to exactly one scale mile? (11 x 3ft = 33 ft, 33 x 160 = 5,280ft, or one mile)

The next step is to build and install a "pivot table". Instead of having more than a dozen turnouts to build, I decided to try something different. The pivot table was a simple 15-inch long piece of flextrack that acts as a cross between a transfer table and a turntable. It was 15 inches long so that it can hold one locomotive and several freight or passenger cars. The idea was to pivot the track to point to one of the storage tracks and then drive the train on to the storage track. The area where all the turnouts were going to be was chosen as the location of this pivot table. The pivot table will have one track leading to it from the helix (both helix tracks will merge into one via a turnout), and at least eleven tracks leading away from it in a fashion similar to that of a turntable. The photo shows the area I had to clear. To see how I built the pivot table bridge, visit my Pivot Table How-To page.

I removed the 1/8" thick cork. The pivot table bridge was made out of 1/8" Masonite board, so the tracks will all line up nicely. After the cork was removed, I sanded the area down.

Here is a shot of the pivot table bridge in place just to test fit it. The inset shows a close up of the pivot point

I had wired all the tracks and the pivot table bridge up to the 14-gauge track feeder bus I had running under the table. The back storage track has been installed. I was successfully able to run a train down the helix, over the pivot bridge, and onto the storage yard. This was very exciting!

Starting at the pivot table, the back storage track was 88 inches (223 cm) long. This will provide storage space for almost twenty freight cars. This next photo shows the view from behind the helix.

The track has been installed. There was a total of 71 feet of flextrack from the front to the pivot table in the back.

As you can see, the track and surrounding area has been painted. The next step was to ballast the area. The blue masking tape served as the back edge of the ballast.

Here is an updated photo of the pivot table in action. I spent a little time doing some switching work using the pivot table and it went well. I don't recommend it in a busy switch yard, but for this situation it was a perfect solution. It was cheap, quick, and effective.

The yard has been ballasted. I used the standard PRR ballast, coal, sand, and earth, all from Arizona Rock & Minerals. The area looks dirty and it was supposed to. The photos below show my entire fleet moved in. This was exciting because this is literally the first time all of my rolling stock was on the layout all at once.