That’s right, I’ve started the scenery. As I was finishing the main street in the New Brighton scene, I realized that before placing buildings the background needed to be in.
Another – if you give a mouse a cookie moment.
As I have mentioned in the past, I’m pretty old school on the basics. For scenery base it is plaster cloth over screen. The only break from the past is that instead of some type of plywood form, I am using black foam core. Why black foam core? Because of a past one off project for a client, I have a foot high stack of 12″ x 18″ black foam core sheets. The plus side is it’s free and easy to cut. Make a mistake, throw it away and try again. Down side is attaching the screen. Glue takes forever and is iffy. Hot glue and foam doesn’t play well together. Ended up taking individual staples from my staple gun and pushing them trough the screen into the foam core. They will hold well enough till the plaster cloth goes on.
I started at the ninety degree corner between the New Brighton scene and the Jackson town scene. My vision is that this will be enough of a view block to separate the two scenes. It is a hill descending from the corner out to the fascia.
Once I established this hill, I worked back to the bridge scene in New Brighton. Below are photos of the progression.
The scenery is started. The outer hill in place.When finished the hill with scenery in place will be the break between scenes.The rear scenery land form in place.First coat of plaster cloth on.
Something that I failed to mention was that the inner section had a retaining wall. What I ended up using for it was a sheet of Department 56 stone cobblestone that I had picked up on discount somewhere. The scale is a bit big, however to the eye it looks right. Meaning the rivet counters won’t be happy, but everyone else won’t notice.
Gluing the retaining wall to the hill form.Continuing the retaining wall around the corner.
After the landform behind New Brighton and the retaining wall were in place I headed around the corner. Problem here is that the hill drops to a small river. And you will notice that there is no river cut out of the plywood base. One of those things I figured I would take care later.
So all work has stopped on the basic scenery till I get the river in. Which is a whole new mouse and cookie story. One I will continue in the next post.
As well as trying to figure out the yard in New Brighton, I have been also working the other side of the aisle. As I have built the individual blocks for my main street along the berm, I hadn’t actually glued anything down. Because all the buildings are close to done and some waiting final installation for the last details, now was time to get the road in.
I used Walther’s road system (Walthers.com) for the city streets. Mainly because it mates up to the railroad bridge. Plus I figured I wouldn’t be scrimping on width for a city street and the sidewalks work with it. Pretty much a win all the way around. One word of caution, the concrete sections have beveled edges so when glued together give the appearance of individually cast sections. Mix these with asphalt sections, because you have both and aren’t paying attention, and you will have some filling to do to even things out.
I had already made the block sections as I built the buildings, so it was just a matter of gluing these together and down to the plywood. In the past I have used contact cement for this. It will hold anything down, forever. But, you have to wait for it to dry before joining the pieces together and like I said you never get it apart. I now have a new best friend for this job. Canopy glue. The first brand I had was RC56, the current bottle is something56, don’t know the name but they all seem to use 56. So far it is holding beautifully and I haven’t knocked anything loose.
When planned the road the idea was for one complete half plus a partial on the other half. The main reason was so at the intersection of Main street and the street under the railroad bridge, I could have the Walther’s working traffic light without it hanging in space.
Prepping the town for actual road installation.
I glued down the main sections and you can see that there is about a 1 inch strip that I needed to cut and fit. Starting on what would be the north end of the street and working south I started to cut and fit the pieces in place.
I started fitting the outer sections that require a lot of trimming on the north end and worked south.Working my way south on Main Street. You can see just past the super market where I have cut and fitted the outside road sections and the pieces waiting for their turn.
I just continued down the street till I got to the end where the road T’s.
South end of the main strip in, filled, sanded and ready for paint.
As you can see I was also doing a little filling of cracks and sanding as I went. Now I need to mask off the fascia and surrounding areas and paint the street and sidewalks.
A couple of other things done. after getting the street in I also put in the foundations for the houses on the north end. with these in place I can put in the plaster yards and start the scenery at that end.
Foundations and sidewalks in for the houses.
In addition to those I have finally settled on which buildings will be on the far side of the railroad overpass.
Final buildings chosen for the background. (Far side of the bridges)
On the right side of the street, not that visible, are a bar and a movie theater. They were chosen for this space because they both have one sided Miller Engineering (microstru.com) signs on them and won’t work else where. And on the left is a Heljan (heljan.dk) building. It was part of a brewery complex, one of those things you pick spur of the moment, that hasn’t found a home yet. The scale looks off to me. Bigger then N scale but smaller then HO scale. In the background it looks right.
Just got back from another week long business trip, but during the week I was home before this trip I was able to get a couple of things done. I just didn’t have time to post anything.
Heading south from Jackson you come around the bottom leg of the peninsula into the city berm scene I had talked about before. Below is a photo that I posted before, it’s of the scene as originally conceived.
Head on view of the bridge/berm scene.
It’s kind of hard to see from this angle but I had intended to have a double track bridge with a single track bridge right behind it. As I actually started working towards this scene I found out that I didn’t have enough room to get the rear track switched off the main and head onto the rear bridge. Looking over the situation I found I could get the track separated far enough if I – A: moved the whole scene over about 8″ and – B: changed the double and single bridges into a single triple track bridge. I was able to modify the girder portion of the bridge into a triple track bridge as the Walthers kit is made for this modification. However, having already built the abutments, modifying them wasn’t as easy. In fact, to say I butchered them would be extremely kind.
So off to the LHS to get a couple of new bridges. For those who care, my hobby shop of choice in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area is Becker’s Model Railroad supply in New Brighton. He had one kit in stock and ordered the second which I had in a couple of days. In case you’re wondering I needed two kits because they build into a double track bridge, if you want three tracks you need two kits.
One of the things I found is that when you build this kit as instructed for a triple track bridge you will end up with about a 1/2″ gap between the girder portion of the bridge and the actual bridge abutment, which works out to about 4 scale feet. The gap is extremely noticeable and looks like crap. So I took some time and studied the model to figure out how to modify it to eliminate the gap and have the abutment look symmetrical. I should note that I had to build the abutment first as it sets the width of the subroadbed.
Below is how I modified and built the abutments.
First I modified the base of the abutment which is also the sidewalk. I marked where I would cut the sidewalk section. In the photos below I highlighted these with arrows.
where the splices in the base plate were made. In addition to joining for the third bridge deck, I had to shorten by half an inch.
After I cut and joined these I began the modification of the actual abutment section. I started with the pillar section of the bridge.
The placement of the splice cuts for the bridge abutment.
The photo above shows where I cut the pillar section. One of the things that the instruction wants you to do is to cut the double pillar( the center one on the lower pillar section ) but I figured if I cut through smaller cross section next to the double pillar I would have a less noticeable seam to fill and hide. Below is a photo with the cuts made, but before assembly.
Base cut and glued together and the abutment ready to be glued.
Once I started to glue the pillars together, I also started to glue the backings on to add strength but I made sure that I staggered the joints so that no two joints were on top of each other.
The joints for the rear of the abutment, cuts are offset to add strength to the front of the abutment.
Once the pillar section was done I glued the works together, filled and sanded the joints.
The bridge abutment glued together and joints filled.
Though I kept checking as I was assembling the abutment, once I finished I put the girder section in place and was happy with the result as there was very little gap when in place.
Bridge deck fitted to the bridge abutment.Bridge abutment primed and waiting for the finish color.
After I finished the bridge abutment I was able to cut the subroadbed and put the works in place. I was then able to lay the cork roadbed in place.
Roadbed laid up to the bridge.
In the photo above you can see a track that is heading to nowhere. The track to nowhere and the rear track on the bridge are for a return loop that will be underneath the helix and needs to be in place and operating before the helix goes up. In the original plan the area I’m using as a return loop is actually a set of staging tracks that feed into the yard. I reversed the direction so that I can set up a portion of the layout with continuous running. Trains can reverse here, run around the peninsula, up the helix and again around the upper portion of the peninsula and then into a reverse loop on the upper level. When I picked this plan, continuous running was the one thing I felt it lacked. I was happy when I figured out how to do this as I like to sometimes watch trains just run. Also I can orbit a train as I switch towns and have to clear the mainline as the other train comes through.
Below is a photo of how the scene will look when finished.
Low angle concept shot of what I want the finished scene to look like. Obviously there will have to be some modification of the bench work that is in the way.Birds eye view of where this scene is headed.
As you can see in the photos I will now have to do some modification of the bench work structure as it is the way of everything. The up side is that I now have more room for structures in the background which will greatly add to the depth of the scene.
I know that I have been putting it off for what seems like forever, but I have some open time coming up. Which means that I will have the base of the helix done probably within the next week or two. This is truly important as it is not only the base for the helix but also the tracks leading into the yard at New Brighton.
