Sprucing Up West Zenith

I turned my attention to the West Zenith area over the past week, mostly because I've belatedly taken up the project of replacing layout fascia that I'd removed when I replaced the DC block wiring with the 24 AWG DCC bus. Here is the fascia section replaced, along with the former DC local panel for the area:

The toggles are variously for a reversing section, cab assingment to blocks, and Tortoise control. In several cases, former pushbuttons for twin-coil machines had already been replaced with Tortoise toggles. However, this has pretty much all now been superseded, and the only electrical controls that are still used here are the red pushbuttons for Kadee electric uncouplers.

So in the near future, I will remove all the remaining toggles and cover the holes with labels that give the decoder addresses for the DCC switch decoders now in use.

But while I was starting this project, I ran across a Bachmann 35714 signal tower that had just arrived at MB Klein (Bachmann photo):

This is built up. It's a Lackawanna standard concrete signal tower. I grew up in part along the Lackawanna, and I always admired its architecture. It's reasonably priced, built up, and in fact less expensive than laser cut or urethane kits for the same prototype, so I had to have it. The obstacle was where to put it. Then I realized that if I cut away some hardshell in the West Zenith area, I could tackle this in the same project as reinstalling the fascia.

The hill shown below hadn't had serious attention in at least 20 years. It was dusty and beat-up, and it was scenically blah:

I measured the dimensions of the Bachmann tower given on the MB Klein website and realized that I could logically locate it here if I hacked away at the hardshell of the scenery and cleared out enough space for a base.

I used a Dremel with a cutting disk and an X-Acto knife.

I still need to clean up the area with the shop vac. Then I can cantilever over the open space with a piece of foamcore cut to size for the tower base and cover things back up with new hardshell from plaster cloth.

The Bachmann tower should arrive in a week or so.