Short night last Tuesday, and we made progress on two projects. On the Maple Valley backdrop, we started by hot gluing the foam pieces together. Then we pulled it away from the backdrop and put it on a large foam piece so we can scenic it. Once on the foam, we painted it with our standard dirt brown. Once dried, we put it back in place just in case the paint affected the foam landforms in any way. Here is how that looks now. We put in a rush Scenic Express order for spring green ground foams in two sizes and a 10mm static grass blend of spring green and yellow. It arrives Friday. We also plan on turning some of the vertical surfaces into rock cuts. One of our other projects is the install of the TrainBoss talking defect detector. Here Ed is working on cutting the grooves under the track that the system requires. More on this in future posts. Thanks for checking in.
Had a rare Saturday off so headed into the layout to get some scenery done. As we all know, scenery can be a messy business. Paint, ground foams and dirt everywhere. While I worked on the Maple Valley landform, Wain put down more clouds and used "fading" to blend clouds and the backdrop. One of our two transitions from backdrop photo to painted backdrop is here: I painted the backdrop with similar colors to give the illusion the photo continued to the left. Then Wain came in and faded the painted areas. We completed the illusion with a tree to cover the seam. After letting the landforms dry for a bit, we put it back in place then called it a day. Still lots to do, but you get the idea where we are headed. Time for football and a beer. Thanks for checking in.
I wish you guys were closer! I’d come get some OJT on those backdrops. The fading and blending is fantastic! Thanks for posting Michael!
Hey Michael, I kind of burned out on model railroading for a few years. I’m getting back into the swing of things now. I’m working on my layout again. Not much scenery yet. I’ve spent the last few weeks prepping the track, cars and operations scheme. I’d like to have some people come test operations soon. I’d like to drop in soon and see how things are going with the RGW. It looks amazing in the thread! I’ll be browsing the Boeing swap meet Saturday. Are you going? Greg
You're always welcome to come by. We still work Tuesday nights 6-930. Not sure on Boeing just yet. Glad you're getting back in. M
Last night we pretty much had everyone focused on finishing the Maple Valley backdrop. We started by using hot glue to get it into place. Then we came back and used play sand to fill in all the gaps, including those behind the foam. We also put down sand in between the tracks to minimize how much ballast we'll end up using. We also added Woodland Scenics "weeds" to tie the foam into the dark grasses on the backdrop. We can now focus on cleaning the ties and getting the ballast completed. I'm sure that's where we'll start next week.
After a wonderful evening at our favorite Bavarian dinner spot, I headed out to the RGW to start working on the west transition of our Maple Valley photo backdrop. Here is literally the only photo I have of this spot as a "before": In this shot you can see the foam landforms and one wing wall on the far right. All of that comes out and we will reuse the wing wall as part of a three tier wall. After cutting all the foam out and removing the wall from the backdrop, I filled in the base with our gap filling, expandable caulk. A little clean up of the hot glue was necessary, but all-in-all, it didn't take long to get it to this point: I use Woodland Scenics retaining walls. They are easy to form using a razor saw and easy to paint/weather. The hardest part here was trying to match the current paint scheme of the tunnel. I start with simple acrylics; burnt umber, raw umber, tan and light gray. I will let these dry for 24 hours and then paint some random bricks on all 3 sections a dark shade. Then I'll give the entire wall a light wash, probably gray with a tinge of black. I'll finish it off with weathering powders, then install and start adding scenery touches. Hopefully in the end it will look something like this: Thanks for checking in.
