Puzzle Pieces
When the truss bridge arrived, I was in the middle of finishing the control panel, and after building the bridge, I went back to work on the panel. One might think I'd instead be making the abutments so the truss bridge could be installed, but that will have to wait just a bit. The reason is that the truss bridge abutment on the near side actually fits right against the edge of the control panel, so in order to get the abutment shaped right, I had to have the panel in place.
Fortunately, as I'd described previously, there's not much to control on this layout, so it was no big deal to wire up the nine switches that comprised the whole of the control system (six track switches, main power, lights and direction). The speed control will be a gutted throttle that's on its way.
The panel itself is a piece of 1/8-inch thick sheet styrene. The graphic was printed on heavy-duty photo paper and laminated with 10 mil clear plastic. The laminated graphic is simply held in place by the switches, and everything is attached to the layout with mounting screws driven into a Gatorfoam support that's bonded to the "benchwork" at a slight angle to improve visibility.
The finished effect gives the layout a lot of eye appeal. And now I can turn my attention back to my new truss bridge!