The Second Cove Road Layout

Modeling – The recent past – The Second Cove Road Layout

On March 1 2018, still in South Carolina, I retired from Boeing. My new wife and I (I'd remarried in 2017) looked at various locations around the country to retire, but I was drawn back to the Cove Road house in Merchantville NJ. So in May 2018 we rented out her house in Summerville and moved to my house in Merchantville.

For me it was like coming home. Juying, my new wife, seemed comfortable there also.

Even before moving, I was already planning the new layout. I'd been out of model railroading for three years, and was chomping at the bit to get active in the hobby again. By the end of December 2017 I had a new track plan developed, and was now simply waiting for March to roll around.

 

December 2017 - The new track plan

This is the lower deck of the "final" plan as developed by the end of 2017. It used a little bit more of the basement square footage than the old Cove Road layout, but it was simpler in that it had only a small second deck, over Laurel (see the next entry). I also expanded Laurel greatly, as I found I really liked the large yard on the Allendale layout.

I thought briefly of just rebuilding the old layout plan since I was in the same space as before (and I really did like that plan), but in six years I completed at best about 15% of the layout. Being about eight years older now, I didn't want to tackle such a large undertaking again.

This is the upper deck of the plan, which only has the Cody branch on it. Laurel is directly below Cody on the lower deck.

This was my fourth try at the same basic operating scheme. For an in-depth look at that scheme, go back and take a look at the Track Plan page of the first Cove Road layout.

Click the buttons below to look at the construction of the second Cove Road layout, or to go on to the last version the layout, in Casper Wyoming.

24 September 2019

It's been about three months since I posted an update because it's been three months since I've worked on the layout.

Why so long?

Because we will soon be leaving New Jersey for Wyoming. Taxes continue to spiral up and up in New Jersey (property taxes on the house here went up nearly $2000 in the last two years!), and they've just gotten to be too much. So we are moving to the land of my birth (and the land of low taxes) - Wyoming. We'll probably wind up in Casper, but Cheyenne isn't out of the question. We're going out soon on a house hunting trip.

The house in NJ is under a sales contract, and is scheduled to close, if no hiccups emerge to slow things down, in late October.

Depending on what sort of basement I find in Wyoming, the layout will either be broken into sections to move, or disassembled completely.

Either way, a new CB&Q in Wyoming, this one version 5, will arise! So stay tuned...