I finally got back down into the basement last night, after more-or-less recovering from this past weekend’s train show, and finished up the ceiling in the model shop area. There are a couple of places where it looks a slight be wonky, but certainly nothing worth worrying about.

I had to steal a bunch of ceiling tiles from the train room to finish out the shop, and initially, I was planning to replace all the ceiling tiles in the train room with Celotex (they’re currently fiberglass). However, there’s so little clearance between the top of the ceiling grid and the bottoms of the joists that I don’t think I’ll be able to angle the stuff Celotex tiles into place, so it looks as if I’ll have to use more fiberglass tiles. Time for another Home Depot run…

The next steps in the shop are paneling the side wall and putting in storage, putting down the flooring and installing the new bench top. At some point, I’ll add the back wall.

The shop flooring might go in tonight. I was just going to lay down a couple of rugs (which I’ve already picked up), but I’m thinking I might splurge and put some dense foam padding underneath to cushion and insulate a little bit. That concrete floor is cold and hard, and the benches are all going to be stand-up height to save my back a bit.

Meanwhile, it looks as if actual benchwork construction for Corinna will begin in Kevin’s shop on Friday after work. Corinna’s public debut will be at the Great Scale Model Train Show in Timonium this coming February.

Today’s mail contained a tidy little package from TAM Valley Depot containing the electronics for controlling the switches on the layout. I ordered an Octopus II, which can control up to channels of servos typically used for R/C airplanes (I purchased my SG90 servos from Hobbypartz for $2.77 each). I also ordered some of TAM’s control control panel switches (with LED position indicators) and an assortment of extension and “Y” cables.

The “Y” cables can serve two functions — either one channel output of the Octopus can drive two servos (for situations like crossovers where two turnouts will always be thrown together) or, they can be used to allow control of a turnout channel from two locations (handy for throwing a switch from two sides of a module, or making “local” and “remote” controls).

As I mentioned in an earlier post, there’s a significant cost savings in using the servos and these control electronics over more traditional Tortoise switch motors, or Bluepoint throws and the associated pushrods. About the only thing not a part of the package I ordered were some method of switching frog polarity. I have a whole slew of micro-switches I plan to use, however, TAM sell nifty little relay boards that plug in to the Octopus board that can also do the job for about $5 each. As much of a pain as micro-switches can be to align and keep aligned, I may end up with relays in the long run.