"Benchwork in a Day" rides again

While not near as ambitious as previous excursions of BiaD, yesterdays little foray was just as important to the layout owner as my larger jobs.
Yesterday I was in Sarnia helping out my friend, Don Janes, with a little project. As his layout has evolved he's wanted to extend his mainline running options and create some hidden staging.
The first step was for Don to clean out the utility room and repurpose a shelving unit into a staging yard.
As seen on the right in the first image.

That was the easy bit.
From there, I took the reins. First was to create the mounting arrangement for the 6' by 10'0" long shelf on the left. So I just strapped the wall with 2' lengths of 1 x 3 to accept steel shelf brackets. Simple, no?
It would have been simple had the hammer drill not failed on the 2nd hole. I wound up having to drill the remainder of the holes for the Tapcon concrete anchors with a conventional drill. Makes the job 4 times as long and thoroughly unpleasant. But we prevailed.
With that done and a simple frame built for the maniline, a "bridge" was required to span across the open space.
It was important to Don that access to the furnace and water heater be maintained. Should either unit fail it will be a simple matter of pulling a couple of screws and lifting the "bridge" out.
We simply cut a 6" wide piece of 5/8" ply, laid it across the spanned area, cut the ends to right angles and then stiffened the plank with a piece of 1 x 4 on either side. It rests on simple cleats.
Don's happy. He can now lay track to his heart's content.

Stay tuned, dear readers. There maybe HUGE news in the offing in a couple of days