Model Railroad - benchwork up and ready

As of August 3rd I had gotten the last of the benchwork (shelf work?) erected and the foam board glued down. The bench work on the East and south wall were once the home of an aborted attempt at an 'N' scale layout, so the foam was pretty marked up. I decided to give the whole works a coat of some tan latex paint I had laying around. I figured this would give me a clean slate so that when I started marking track centers I wouldn't get confused with the old markings. I also thought that tan would look much better in the short term than pink and it might help me later on when I start ballasting track to already have it painted under the ties.

This first photo is looking towards the southeast corner of the layout. This short section is where the canal is going to go.




At the time I was not quite sure what I want to do about a backdrop on the new north shelf. I could put up a piece of 1/8" masonite like the east wall, but then I would have to work around a thermostat at the far west end of the shelf. The alternative would be to just paint the appropriate section of the drywall the same blue color and let it go at that. The thermostat is a line level style (240v) and I really don't feel like going to the bother of relocating it.

While the paint is drying on the benchwork, I decided to start laying out the track using the 1:1 print feature of XTrkCad planning software. This software is just fantastic, as is the price (Free!). A roll-fed chart printer would have been nice - but I had to suffice with printing the layout on 48 sheets of good old 8 1/2x11 paper. I decided to assemble (tape together) the track template on the pool table since the layout bench was still wet. This actually worked out better because of the larger space to work with and the lower height. Once the paint on the foam dries, I'll start transferring the track centers to the foam.In the photos, the thinner section to the right is the north shelf and the wider section is the east shelf.