Rebuilding the Ore Dock – Part Two

February 6 thru June 28, 2021

Problems with alignment on the ore dock prompted me to take it apart and rebuild it. The first thing to do was to shore up the foundation. This was done by adding additional bracing and then building a larger foundation to attach to the benchwork eventually.

Gluing in additional braces helped a lot, but there was still one major alignment problem between the third and fourth sections of the dock.

Those horizontal lines needed to line up, so the model was further dismantled to fix this problem.

After much bracing and gluing, the lines were as close as I could get them so I proceeded to build the wood base for the structure. This had to be carefully measured to ensure that the dock would line up perfectly with the ore yard that was already in place.

Once the platform was built, it was test fit and seemed to be about right.

The base was then fitted with a styrene facade to help it look like a part of the model. Curving the corners was a challenge and my first approach with the styrene was not satisfactory. I ordered some larger pieces of Evergreen styrene and eventually got it right.

I painted what I had so far but when I went to mount the deck pieces that I had painstakingly sanded to remove all of the adhesive I encountered a new problem.

If you look carefully, you can see that the guides for the rails on the deck do not align between sections. Fixing the horizontal line problem had caused this section to misalign. I thought I could probably just sand it down, but this would be a pretty glaring problem. That had to be solved. After weeks of thinking about another complete dismantling of the model, it occurred to me that cutting a deck section in half and allowing a full section to straddle the problem area might work. I had extra deck sections so if the experiment failed I would be able to recover. The half section idea worked. I was ecstatic!

After solving the alignment problem, I went on to some other projects around the layout and prepared for a visit from members of the Michiana Division of the National Railroad Association in September 2021.