Minneapolis Fork. Part 4. First steps.

How did all this happen? What prompted all this activity on a possible Minneapolis Fork layout? This happened, I found all my US outline O scale stock.

My pile of O scale stock

I knew that I had been accumulating stock over the years. I bought my first Weaver box car, a Marinette, Tomahawk and Western Box Car (the green car at the top of the photo) back in March of 2014. I started detailing it and even considered converting it to P48 for a while.

When you accumulate things over time you don’t really notice how much you’ve got. In the grand scheme of things, It’s not a large amount of stock, but it’s certainly varied enough to run a small inglenook type switching layout. 

That’s where the idea to build my own take on Chicago Fork comes from. I have a suitable baseboard already…

An old baseboard from some project or other is almost the right  size

Much like rolling stock, I accumulate baseboards without realizing it. Some are from past experiments in baseboard construction. I've built test baseboards from materials like foamcore, pink foam, and white polystyrene foam. Some have worked well, others less so. It’s a long list of materials I’ve tried over the years. 

Other baseboards were from previous layouts. Some may well have been exhibited. Others were failures as layouts and never made it to the exhibitable stage. I'd recently had a big clearout of baseboards so I knew I had something of a suitable size for my own version of Chicago Fork.

So I dug it out, measured it up and... well, that's material for another post.