Raising the Western Hoosic Division Layout

One interesting thing on Lou Sassi’s Western Hoosic Division layout is that he raised it 8 inches from 32 inches now to 40. One would think this would be a huge job that required a lot of help, but for Lou it wasn’t. For him, it was the worrying involved that was more of the problem, not the actual execution. The whole project took about 5 hours.

One member of his group of fellow modelers known as the Tree Group is known to come up with all kinds of handy ideas for layouts. This member was at Lou’s house one evening and Lou was telling him that for the past decade he had been thinking about raising the layout. Lou asked him how he thought he could go about raising it. They started discussing how it would be built and counted up the number of legs on the layout.

The layout is on L girders and has 32 2 by 4 legs. His friend’s suggestion was to use threaded rods mounted alongside the 2 by 4 legs with brackets, running a nut up the threaded rods and turning the nuts against the mounts on the legs. This way he could use the rods as jacks to lift up the layout. For more tips for planning your layout, visit the Model Railroad Academy website.