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As my friends of mine know, I’ve been in to model railroading for quite some time. My original table was when I was a kid and was pretty simplisitic.
Then We revived it in one of my old houses. And THEN it really took off. Here’s a picture of the train table about a month before Hurricane Katrina.

This table unfortunately got ruined by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. In fact, as proof of the dedication to the train table, the first item recovered from my house in Gentilly was indeed my HO scale Pickle factory. But we didn’t let that kill it forever. I’ve been building up a collection of box cars, people, buildings, and other important scenery.
Now we have begun building the new table.

Here’s pictures of the table as it’s being created.

Day 1 of Construction: First leg of the table is built. A little tall, but built.

Day 2 of Construction: The framing for the other side is built. Shortened the legs to the first table part by about 6 inches.

Day 3 of Construction: Let’s put the other top on and see what it looks like with the buildings spread out on it.

Day 4 of Construction: Added the center piece for the inside curve, spackled and painted. All while the town waits paitiently outside in the backyard.

Day 5 of Construction: Laying down raodbed and track.

Day 6 of Construction: No pictures, but we were working on correcting flubs in the turns where the turn was a little too imperfect for the train’s liking.

Day 7 of Construction: We have a complete loop and we’re testing the train out! There’s still a few areas that are giving the train some problems, but that’s mere child’s play (pun intended) in comparison. Here’s video of the first engine running on the track. Yes, It’s a New Orleans streetcar.

The first run Video

Day 8 of Construction: We’ve fixed the quirks that we were having last time and tested the track again with 2 engines pulling 15 cars. We’ve also started putting out the buildings so we can figure out the town mapping. Here’s pictures and another video of the train running in the current status of the table.

THE VIDEO OF THE TRAIN LAYOUT BEGINNING WITH A MULTI CAR TRAIN ON THE TRACK.
Days 9-11 of Construction: Time to starting building some of the remaining buildings.

Days 12-14 of Construction: Where should everything go in this town? We begin City layout so we can decide where roads and sidewalks and such are gonna be. To create roads, we taped off with painter’s tape and sprayed Bed Liner Coating (the stuff that they use to protect the bed of a pickup truck). We then taped off again once it dried and laid sidewalks using a Grey wall paint that I bought at the hardware store in a sample size for like $2 or $3. (score!)