Layouts and layout building

    How does one place a backdrop around the water meter?  I cut the benchwork and plywood around

  the water meter. 

                                                                                                                  Chris Oestreich

Make a removable mountain out of styrofoam. First glue up a block larger than the meter. Carve the outside to look like a mounbian that fits your layour. Hollow out the block so it sits over the meter. You can carve this stuff pretty thin. If you break through, glue a piece in and recarve. Paint and use ground cover and trees to suit. This is easy and the piece removes easily.

 I agree with Art's approach.  Place and easily removable scenery block to cover the meter.  It probably isn't wise to put to much scenery in the area since water meters do fail and plumbers don't mind tearing up large areas to gain access.  Mine failed and when the plumber replaced it I had him move it a little so that I could hide it behind a backdrop but still be accessible.  A little costly but the aesthetics are better.

Joe

If the water meter is so high that it will be behind the backdrop, it shouldn't be too expensive to simply have it lowered.  Mine isn't in the layout room, but it's only a couple feet above the basement floor (and has a remote read-out outside of the house).

Then, all you'll need to do is curve the backdrop around the pipe, with access to the meter beneath the layout.  The bulge in my Masonite backdrop, below, covers the main drain for the house (there's a cleanout, easily accessible, below the layout) and also curves around an outside corner of the basement wall, accounting for the wide radius of the compound curve.  The gap is for construction of a second level of the layout.

Wayne

 Remember Murphy's Law.  As soon as you place something in front of the meter and it becomes inaccessible, it will break.  And as others have said, the plumber won't hesitate to tear anything and everything out of the way to get to it, so make anything you place in front of it easily removable.

And doesn't the water company have to get to it for reading?  If you hide it behind something, what will the meter reader do?  Probably tear out any and all obstructions.

This is simply another issue demonstrating that room preparation should be the first step in building a layout.

Wayne

Thinking outside the box...

Build an industrial-commercial structure that fits UNDER the water meter, and add signage for the local water utility.  If a spur serves the structure, you can use it to deliver tank car loads of chlorine (o, the pleasure of hazmat movements) and gondola loads of pipe, along with an occasional box car.

What's in the box car?  Water meters...

Chuck (Modeling Central Japan in September, 1964)