As part of building a long-term toy train layout, we decided to use a commercial layout benchwork kit from Mianne Benchwork.  Why?  Easy -- I've built benchwork before and don't care to do it again!  (I'm not terribly good at it, either!) 

Anyways, this kit is made out of poplar--not a single twisted or cracked piece of wood--not like those twisted pine sticks you get from the local home supply store!

Sylvia helped a lot with putting it together and made fun of a recent hobby magazine review where the reviewer said it took two people about 6 to 8 hours to put together a 4 X 8 Mianne Benchwork kit.  Even counting the time for discovering and finding our assembly mistakes, we only used about 10 hours of time to put together our 6 X 16 foot layout kit!

Here you see the disassembled benchwork kit, looking like a pile from a large size Tinkertoy kit, laying on the floor, ready for assembly.  Notice the blue tape on the floor--keep watching and you'll see why it's there....

In the photo above, we're about one-third done (although here's where we found one of our mistakes -- the long unit at the end is really the middle beam; not an end one!  Oh, well, we caught the problem and fixed it!

A few hours later, we had the framework assembled....then took out the straight edge laser, cut the lights and aligned everything into horizontal and vertical plumb!  The guys on This Old House would be proud of us!

And, of course, the little kid in me had to show off how things were going to look at the end...

...so here's a bridge, a hopper car and piece of track on the the layout!

Now on to cutting the plywood and Homasote for the layout's platform!