El Capitan Finds a New Home

This winter I got a call from my friend asking if I wanted the El Capitan from his garage. They were preparing to sell the house and knowing I no longer had a train, he thought I might enjoy having the El Capitan for my garage. Of course, I jumped at the opportunity and arranged for a Saturday to come over and remove the track, transformer, and "repossess" the El Capitan.

To prepare for the El Capitan's arrival, I constructed a ceiling shelf in my new man-cave/garage. Since this garage is 3-cars wide, I decided to build a single-car size track and run a 22' vertically hung suspension bridge along one edge. This makes one leg of the track visible from both sides.

The construction of this shelf was virtually identical to my original garage project. A single sheet of 5/8" plywood cut into 6" wide strips provided the self. L brackets were attached below the shelf and drywall anchors were used when the bracket did not land on a stud. 

The first piece of the bridge was the hardest and I spent a fair amount of time leveling the shelf/bridge. It would have been a lot easier if I had a laser level. As it turns out I got one at a yard sale a couple weeks after the project was complete. 

The corners were 2'x'2' and I used a paper template to cut the inside radius. I left the outside corners for future use. The straights were cut to length and the "bridge" was suspended from the ceiling studs with anchor screws, couplers, and 6" 1/4-20 carriage bolts. Hanging the shelf/bridge took a better part of two Saturdays, but in the end I had a nice solid level surface to run the train.

My goal was to hang the shelf low enough to use license plates as a backsplash. It was really close but I cleared the garage door pilly by just enough.

The shelf was trimmed out with the same 1" x 1/8" aluminum trim I used in the first garage almost 20 years ago. The final touch was to install the license plates and I ran a 48' rope light around the perimeter to provide uplight. I'm quite happy with the finished product.