Finished the last module which is the bunkhouse scene. This one has its allotment of figures plus a few extras. Shot from the back and yes that is a deer hanging from the tree waiting to be dressed out. It is fall and hunting season. An overhead shot. And a slight angle shot showing the whole deer being slowly roasted over a slow wood fire all day by the cook. The scene has three bunkhouses that were formerly log camp bunkhouses. The longer building is the kitchen and dining hall while the small structure with the tanks on the roof is the showers. A small pump house is adjacent to the dining hall and there is an oil tank made from a GC Laser kit at one end to provide hot water. The rest of the structures use wood for heat and cooking therefore the wood piles outside. The deer on the spit came from my collection of deer (I did my own butchering) and the spit at the fire pit was made from styrene rod. The hanger that the deer is hung in the tree from is also made from styrene rod and the rope from my ship building supplies. Visible in several of the scenes are two herders just in from the hills, the Kenobi brothers, Obi and Wan and a small Beagle is near some of the cooking wood in the middle. Under the trees are some outhouses and one of the herders wagons. I have a supply of poles and insulators for power but that will come after all this gets onto a layout. With this done I will go back to some of the previous modules and complete them with people and vehicles now that my last order of machinery is on the way. Next up will most likely be to finish my fleet of small vessels for the port scene and then by this fall I should be starting my one stall engine house and doing some serious thinking about what locos I will divest myself of along with some equipment. I at the most only need about 14 locos or less to operate the next layout and far less cars than the almost 800 I have.
Thanks, since this last photo I have added two pop up campers behind the row of bunkhouses, the early style little tear drop shaped ones, and a car, two dog houses a sheep dog and her pups.
Yup. I've tried to keep most of my vehicles to the 1940s and 50s era but there appears to be two extremes when it comes to vehicles. Either modern or horse and buggy so I have had to do a balancing act with some of this. I have found a lot of horse drawn equipment if I wanted to have set the tine frame earlier. Most of the farm equipment has been way too modern for my era when it came to motorized stuff. I also decided on sticking with a ranch rather than a farm. The only fields I have to create at some point will be hay fields, or grazing land, much easier to do and cheaper. Basically the story line is that the herders are seasonal returning home in late fall and some of the ranch hands are also seasonal or migrant thus the small pop up trailers. A staff of about eight runs the ranch year round. The feed grinding plant also supplies some other outfits so it runs year round supplying also the stockyards. The grain used in the feed grinding plant is brought in by rail or truck thus the occasional boxcar in grain service. So managing to keep things rail dependent also. I just have to create a small siding for grain unloading and molasses unloading. Mr. Sabat's spring lambs are trucked to the stockyard for rail loading and shipping. And since I envision a point to point operation everything comes and goes by car float, or small coastal vessel, out of the port including the stockcars.
Before putting away in storage I took two last photos of the ranch modules with all the vehicles and people in place. As seen in the first photo the whole shebang covers 2 ft. 3 in. wide by at the most 11 in. deep for one module. My intention is to spread this out over a 3 foot area so there will be scenic areas in between each module of grass, trees, possibly a small stream. The layout design has a 3 foot wide island and that is probably where it will end up. If space is a concern then I am prepared to cut one barn module out and maybe the feed grinding plant. The ranch house will most likely end up on a small hill set back some from the rest of the modules. Other scenes incorporated will be two small hay fields in the process of being cut and baled and to that end I have two tractors, one with a side bar cutter, and a haybaler that should arrive tomorrow. Two thirds of the layout will be hills and woods so somewhere on a hillside clearing will be the sheep herd of which I have about 140 of the little critters in route to add to the 70 I already have. Through all this the railroad meanders on its way to the sawmill and log camp. And an overhead shot of the lined up modules.
Thanks all for the comments and suggestions that have accompanied this build thread. As far as the trees go there are several different types that were used. Since I used for the bases for the modules a cardstock product that is about a shade over 1/16th of an inch thick I had to be slightly creative in my tree mounting. Starting with the ranch house I used two types, Woodland Scenics tree armatures for the apple trees above the root cellar and then again Woodland Scenics material for the yard. Since the root cellar is built up the base was simply drilled out and the trunk ACC'd. Woodland Scenics has bags of plant material with stems to use for scenic effects such as tree foliage. I have found the both the stem and shape of some of the foliage material makes good small trees when used separate and they are very light weight so easy to secure with a drop of ACC in a small hole in the thin base. When I add the ground cover that along with the scenic glue that adds more to secure the tree. on a couple of the modules I did use the base that came with the tree armatures, trimming the base to fit and ACCing the tree base to module base then applying ground cover to blend the base in. Again the ground cover and scenic glue further secure the trees. The bunkhouse scene uses some Aspen/Birch/Popular trees I had bought a long time ago. Very lightweight and they are secured in hollow depressions drilled out to hold a drop of ACC in the module base. Again the scenic base material is built up around it and the material and the scenic glue lock them in. The big tree on the bunkhouse module is another plastic armature and base glued onto the slight rise built up in the corner. I dry bush a light coat of gray paint on the plastic armatures which gives a decent color effect to the brown plastic tree bark which tends to be shiny. Since my timeline is set in the fall almost all my trees will have some fall foliage showing and the tree at the bunkhouse area shows a tree slowly turning thus the mix of some green with the fall foliage. I have a plant in my garden that I don't begin to know what it is but it gets very small flower clusters on it which turn color and dry out in the late summer and fall. Makes excellent trees. I guess I will have to take a sprig to my local nursery sometime this year to find out, although I do remember and article about this plant for scenery use. From the beginning of this project I have had a clear picture of what I wanted based on some distant memories and some distant experiences growing up out west. Bunkhouses and seasonal hired ranch hands were something common to an earlier era and to my time as a youngster thus what I modeled. My Uncle was the foreman in charge, of a big for the time, ranch for Campbell Soups. The main products were hay for feed and cattle. His entire family was on the payroll with his wife and daughter serving as the ranch cooks and his sons working as hands plus the seasonal ranch hands. There was a small airstrip on the ranch so the folks from Campbell could fly in to check on their cattle and this was in the 50s. They never bought a pound of beef at the store simply walking out to select one from the herd and loading it up to go to a local meat processor. Doing this in small module form gives me much more flexibility in locating the complex on the new layout and since the whole end of the layout is at a higher level and sparsely populated there is the room. I have designed a couple of spots where the railroad in climbing to the upper level curves back around and crosses the valley on a trestle on its way to the sawmill and log camp. It is probably going to be in that valley that the ranch gets located with the ranch house anchoring one side and the bunkhouse anchoring the other. The ranch house module has elevation on the left rear side while the bunkhouse module has elevation on the right rear side already designed in. I just need to get myself into my permanent retirement home so construction can start on the layout which I hope is soon.
Folks can do something similar to this using The Laser Art #850 barn set which gives one a large and small barn, machinery shed, and chicken coop along with the smokehouse. The farm or ranch house was from AMB's kit #640 which is a large house however there are smaller farm houses out there both as kits or ready built. Any small house can do that is of a little older era. The feed mill is a combination of the small barn from the kit and some Rix grain handling structures with the small barn holding the feed grinding machinery. I added another barn which is a feeder barn style again from AMB kit #617. However there are smaller barns in wood laser kit form out there by Mountaineer Precision Products that are of varying sizes and roof designs, all having a smaller footprint than the barns I used. Two of those barns were used in the stockyard project that preceded this project for an idea of size. The bunkhouses and accompanying structures are all scratch built structures from my log camp collection of structures. Corral fencing was from several suppliers and all were short of gates needed for what I was doing. As previously pointed out I did not like the thinness of the etched fence posts and laminated styrene to the brass. However Kestrel Designs makes some plastic fencing with each package containing 30 inches of fence. Again the problem of no gates but at least the fence posts are the right thickness. I made my gates by simply laying out the appropriate sized styrene strips for both the kestrel product and the brass fencing and gluing it in place with the appropriate bracing. To hold the fencing I ended up tacking the fence into place with ACC and then applying the ground cover with scenic glue. This secured and locked the fence into place. In short one can model a small scene with a small house, one of the small barns, and with a simple open front equipment shed. If you are doing an older era farm good luck on finding equipment that isn't to modern, thus I built some of my own. There are tractors and manure spreaders out there that were too modern for my era. I have yet to find a hay rake of any design thus I built my own. Folks have questions about anything feel free to fire away and I will try my best to answer them.
And for the finishing touches got my last equipment order in today. One tractor with a sidebar cutter. one without anything and a baler. My a version to widow maker tractors continues over into my modeling. These little packs were in a box almost 25 times the size of all three together buried in peanuts.
Neat baler. Wish I could rationalize one, but 20 head of Holstein do just fine with keeping my only (modeled) pasture cropped. Guess I have to buy my winter hay from you. BTW, I prefer a 30/30/40 mix of clover/alfalfa/timothy if you don't mind, better for milk production, doncha know...LOL
And they are. The sidebar equipped tractor and the baler is by Wiking. They make a pretty nice line of assembled equipment and the tractor has an old look which is right for me. The other tractor is by Herpa and is a McCormick model. Beats the heck out of trying to assemble a GHQ model. I looked at that auction site but most of what I saw was crude even by toy standards and overpriced. I kept looking and my favorite dealer just got a new stock in and the equipment I wanted was there and in my hands four days after ordering. Also found the tractors with sidebar cutter at another dealer I have frequented but the price was better at the first. I even found my sheep in bulk after a bit of looking and one set included a herder's wagon, however it was a two wheeler common to Europe. The four wheel version was more common in the west here. My sheep will arrive by Wednesday so I will have most if not all the components in hand for the ranch.
The wagon was included as part of a set and I could not justify the cost just to get two wagons to bash and really not adding appreciably to my number of wooly critters. I decided to spend my $$ to get a bulk pack of the woolies since I also did not need the sheperds or dogs. Also the design was not the Basque design which has been used in this country for about 100 years now. The design is even different in shape than a covered wagon thus I was better off building mine. I did work from a set of plans and built mine to scale, but even doing that they seemed large when set by what was supposed to be an N scale pick-up truck.
Hi John, Read through your entire thread and you've done an outstanding job. I agree with how it's tough to model a particular early era of a farm/ranch. Your haystackers are very impressive. My uncles was a commerically bought John Deere tractor and a homemade one from a 1956 Chevy pickup. My uncle ran a small ranch/farm in Central Nevada in the early 60s. It was located about 5 miles north of Round Mountain, Nevada in Smokey Valleyl. The bailer we used was from the late 1940s and required 5 people to operate. It was a real mechanical monster. In fact, it is still on the property and is truly an antique. It was about 8 to 10 feet tall and required 2 people to wire fasten the 100 pound bails. My uncle then moved back to South Dakota and took over his father's ranch/dry farm. It was very large, 5000 acres. He had oats, barley, wheat with fields of grass, alfalfa and sweet clover for hay. We usually had 2 cuttings in the summer of hay and in late July we did the harvesting of the grains. He also had about 500 head of cattle. The local boys including this displaced Nevadan worked on the ranch in the summers branding, cutting and raking hay and all other things that were required. Your modeling really brought back some great memories. Many thanks and excellent modeling. Can't wait to see your other projects.
Thanks for the comments. I relived several portions of my early years out west with both the stockyard and the ranch modules. Hopefully with the stockyard project I showed that it was possible to modify a kit into a smaller footprint even adding another structure and in that case split the kit into two modules with a couple of small barns added to the mix. With the ranch modules I showed that it is possible to get a fairly decent ranch rather than a farm for the rural parts of a layout and it does not need to be as large as mine. A simple single story ranch house, small to medium sized barn, and an equipment shed plus corral fencing is about all that is needed. With a farm you need fields and crops which can be expensive and a pain to model. A ranch just needs a hayfield and pasture, or grazing land. The last shipment for the ranch arrived Wednesday which increased my herd of sheep to about 190 of the little critters. So I have enough to stock the one corral, a herd out grazing under the watchful eye of a herder with his wagon and dogs, and enough to have some in the stockyards.
