First off, I have a confession.  I am not a carpenter.  I have never framed a house or built a deck or raised a barn.  Therefore, benchwork intimidates me.  My first layout, a small switching layout I had as a kid was built by my dad.  My second layout was assisted by my dad.  My last layout was entirely built by myself, but it was unstable...and that's being generous.  I knew going into this that in order for this to be an enjoyable layout to work on and run, it would have to have the best benchwork I'd ever built in my life.

In part one of my swing gate I made the basic gate and got lots of good input from many of you.  I want to give a special thanks to Trevor for posting links to his gate where I saw how he added a diagonal brace.  It got me to looking critically at my gate and I could see that with only one top hinge that any downward pressure on the end opposite the hinge could easily damage the hinge.  Here's what it looked like:

Hello, my name is Brad Ketchen. I am a musician, music engineer, sound editor and composer living in the Greater Toronto area. I say the GTA as my Girlfriend and I are moving to a condo in Toronto. This creates a dilemma, as I figure out the future of my railroad, Ontario South Central Railway and accomodating it in our new living space. Luckily, my girlfriend understands the need for a room to relocate the OSCR as well as my current location of the railroad on the adjacent wall to my recording work station.

Well, I had been putting it off long enough so this long Labor Day weekend I decided to tackle the gate for my benchwork.  I had been trying to decided between a lift (hinged) gate and a swing gate.  After careful consideration I decided on a swing gate as I believe that I (personally) have a better chance of achieving and keeping track alignment with a swing style gate.