Sugarwood Blog

Wow, it has been almost five years since I posted on my blog (this blog). Time sure gets away from me.

Well, I hope to do better. A lot has happened over the past years, so let me catch you up.

Let me just say that keeping up with a weekly update schedule is difficult if you don’t write for a living. So, I will provide updates, but there is no schedule at the moment.

So here is what happened: The place we lived in back in 2020 was of 1950s origin, and therefore, had little insulation in the walls and attic. My office area was upstairs in a bedroom that was in the attic. So, that and the equipment I had in the office made it extremely hot in the summer. The winters were okay, but after working all day there, I usually did not want to be there after dinner. My haste in building tracking and some assumptions about wood (it’s all the same, right? An 1/8 inch is the same in plywood and basswood, isn’t it? Well, no.) made me dissatisfied with the layout. While I did continue to work on the layout, progress was slow to non-existent.

Then, in 2022, we decided to move. Well, there’s no point continuing if I don’t know what my new space will be, so all forward progress stopped. When we found a space, my plan could not be adapted, so I had to start the design process all over again.

We moved into our new space in January 2024, right in the middle of one of the coldest cold snaps Vancouver, British Columbia, has seen in years. The weekend we moved, it was down to -18 °c. For those of you familiar with Vancouver, BC, you’ll know that a cold winter is when it gets down to -5 or -6 °c, so -18, yeah, no one was ready for that.

Now, to tell more than I should, it’s a condo. We got this place because it’s going through a complete exterior renovation—yep, new siding, windows, doors, and plumbing. Why is that important? Well, one week after we moved in, as the weather warmed up above freezing, a sprinkler pipe on the 4th floor that had frozen thawed and flooded all the way down to the ground. Luckily, we hadn’t unpacked, and most of our stuff was still in the bins we moved with, so we only lost the two new rugs we bought. However, the ceiling had to come down in all but the two bedrooms and bathrooms. Yep, my space as well. To bring this trial to a close, they finally finished the repairs in January of 2025.

This is my new space.

I have spent the last couple of years trying to develop a new plan, so, in April 2025, I gave up and asked for help. I contacted Rob Chant at the Journal of Model Railroad Design on Facebook group Journal of Model Railroad Designand his website http://jomrd.com. I sent him my space, what I was working on, and my Givens and Druthers. After some discussion, I commissioned a design.

Here is what he came up with.

This is way better than my designs and worth the price. After at least 2 years, I had not gotten anywhere near what Rob came up with in a few days.

To review the benchwork I will be using, check out my June 2020 post, “Why does it take so much longer than you think?”. I completed three of the six planned modules in 2020, which will be reused here. I will clean them up over the next bit and start on the plan. I still plan on hand-laying the track and turnouts. The “Snap-Track” approach works well enough, but I am still deciding if that is the way to go.

I plan to keep updating, but not weekly, and definitely sooner than I have in the past.

Until next time.