Lego City Layout: New Benchwork

After loosely laying out most of my Lego Train and City material on my old HO train set bench work, I spotted a couple design flaws right away.  The first, was that the L shape of the bench work and the curve radius of the Lego train track would make it very difficult to fit a loop of track on the display, precluding the ability to have a continuously running train.  Also, Lego base-plates come in dimensions based off multiples of 5 inches.  The existing bench work was all sorts of different dimensions, none of them remotely related to the standard base-plate sizes.  This made it very awkward to fit things in place and make everything work.  Plus, I wanted a display that could be at least somewhat portable and expandable.  So I decided last month that if I wanted to be serious about a Lego Train and City display, I would need to come up with a design dedicated to that purpose.  I laid out some design priorities and ran through a variety of ideas, ultimately deciding on a design that would be entirely modular:  Light weight tables of consistent measurements with detachable legs that can fit together in a number of expandable configurations, while allowing room underneath for my storage boxes.  The final design would be 30 inches by 60 inches.  Standard Lego base-plates are 10 inches, so this would allow each table to fit 18 base-plates, plenty of room!  For the initial and most simplistic layout, I can run tables together in a square with a 30 inch by 30 inch space in the middle and allow for a continuous train track loop around the outside.  This also allows me to work on the layout in bite size chunks, building one table, working on the display for it and then only moving on to the next one when I am done with the previous.  To that end, I dived in, and went to my local home improvement store, having them custom cut a 4x8 foot piece of quarter inch sanded plywood down to a 30x60 inch size (to save myself some cutting at home and trying to transport a full size sheet of plywood).  I also grabbed some 1x2 inch sanded boards for creating the actual frame and some 2x2 sanded pine legs in pre-cut 3 foot lengths.  With the top itself and the legs pre-cut, I only had to do some simple miter saw work to cut down the 5 pieces of 1x2 for the frame.  I went for a simple outside frame with a single cross brace, screwed it all together along with the plywood top and then sanded the edges and faces of the whole table to give it a nice, smooth, semi finished look.  I also painted the top of the display a gloss dark grey (very similar to the grey of the Lego road base-plates I would be using) so that nothing obvious would show through the cracks between the base-plates.  Long term, I will eventually attach wider, finished fascia boards all around the outside that will cover up joints, screws and the edge of the plywood top, along with sticking up above the table top by a 1/4 inch to help keep base-plates from sliding off.