The town of Curlew WA was the most recent to be built and while loosely following the arrangement of the real Curlew, several liberties were taken to increase the number of industries serviced by the railway. As such, the model version ended up mostly flat with a lot of tracks. This suggested that maybe a different style of construction was warranted.
All of the previous benchwork construction is traditional L-girder with joists and two layers of narrow, laminated 3/8” plywood for the track sub-roadbed. This worked very well for Grand Forks and the mountainous areas, but it required a lot of fill-in between the tracks for buildings in town. So, I thought I’d try to laminate large sheets of 3/8” plywood to cover the entire area, with the thickness matching the main roadbed at the edges. I didn’t want to use the readily available modern pine plywood because it has a very thin veneer on both surfaces that makes it hard to plane down to get precise joints. I have always used good old fir plywood, so that’s what I went in search of. It seems to only be available at specialty lumber yards these day, so ok, a trip into Burnaby for a few sheets. Well, soon after getting them home I noticed a distinct curl to them, but I figured that with glue and clamps they would flatten out nicely. Big mistake! I soon realized that decent flat fir plywood is a thing of the past.
Cutting a very long story short about trying to flatten it, suffice it to say that even with a LOT of glue, clamps, and a laser level to check everything the stuff was so resistant to flattening out, that it was lifting up the entire benchwork at one point because of the strength of the clamps trying to bend it down. Everything just came up instead. That was solved with a lot of weights and patience. I did find out how great laser levels are in a darkened room where you can split the thickness of the beam on the edge of a bunch of 1×4″ pine blocks. Good enough for our work!
The joint between the sheets required quite a lot of planing to flatten it out where the tracks would cross, but thanks to the thick plys of the fir plywood, that worked just fine.
In the end it all worked out and is almost level throughout to prevent cars from rolling away.
