It's Monday, 10-29-07 – Weekend Modeling Accomplishments!

It was another nutty weekend. On Saturday we had Cub Scout Fitness Day. My son tied for first place for our pack. On Sunday his football team lost their final game of the season. The wife dragged me around a couple of stores looking at carpet. You know no good can come of that.

No modeling this weekend. Now that football and basketball are over we have basically nothing until basketball starts again in January I should be able to get more modeling time.

 

Finished laying track, and ran the first train. I painted the foam brown, and can now begin planning buildings and start on painting the track.

 

Worked on the "Coal Branch" of my layout all weekend. Saturday AM, I added wiring to all the closure rails of the turnouts that would be hidden. This was effectively 4 turnouts. Saturday PM was college football.

Sunday AM, I mapped out the plan w/ the plywood laid out on my drive way. Cut it out, and got it set in place. Now I have to go back and level the risers and adjust the risers to the proper grade as it comes through the closet from the other room. This portion of my layout will be an area known as "Amario de Madre". (Mom's closet).

Here's a shot of the plywood parked on the driveway.



Here's a shot of the "stuff" in place w/ clamps temporarilly holding the risers until I can get everything set:

 

I got my homework done on Friday night, freeing up the weekend for hobby and household stuff. My son wanted to go to the stamp store to get a few more of the bargain stamps for his collection, so I took him there on Saturday morning and picked up a few new acquisitions for my own collection too. Saturday afternoon I got to work on the layout; I put in the cork roadbed for most of the mainline on the lower level peninsula (the part where I had photos last time) before running out of Liquid Nails.

Sunday was mostly household stuff and sorting/mounting the stamps that I bought on Saturday.

 

I measured out what I believe to be the available space for a layout in my alloted basement lair so that I would no longer be operating on guesses and half-information. I added these dimensions, making room for the door swing, and put them on my track plan.

This created difficulty for my nascent Astoria Yard, which I now saw would not fit in the available space on the north wall. I had been planning on putting it there because it was also the northern part of my layout.

Since my layout is not dependent on prototype sunlight, I decided to flip the yard to the south wall and quit worrying about it.

The MAIN modeling thing I did this weekend, however, was work on my Climax 18-tonner kit, which I have been documenting on my web log (shameless plug):

Climax 18-Ton Class A Locomotive - Day 2 - TrainBoard.com

Adam

 

Good weekend with a few trains running. First signal installed on the layout. Can't connect it due to some hardware problems. The signal has common '-' and my Lens decoder has common '+'. Now in search of some other decoder so I can have the signal lights.

 

I improved some old Atlas PS-1 box cars with Gold Medal Models kits. One car is lettered as X29D, so I decided to adapt the underframe to resemble the typical look of a X29. Also added some styrene strips and etched stirrups, roofwalks and brakewheel.
Now it looks much better, though it is still no real model of the X29D

 

I started making mountains (and tunnels) out of (foam) molehills on the second door of my 2-door layout.
Didn't get to run any trains, no time:tb-sad:.

Dave.

 

Not much. Saturday afternoon, I went to an O Scale club open house. It's the same every year, and it never changes, but the layout is so cool that it doesn't matter. Although like most layout opperators at open houses, they don't really get the operating down the way I like. For instance if they're backing a train into a siding, they do it fast and jerky. And way too many times, they have a long freight flying across the tracks which doesn't look too believable. Anyway, the layout inspired me to do some work on mine when i got home, but when I did I had to go out to a concert, so all the motivation was lost! Then Sunday, I had a family obligation so no modeling got done. However, this weeked I'm going to the big Expo Center train show in Reading NJ on the way to Strasburg for a train weekend.

 

Nothing! I've got a Central Valley turnout kit and looked at it. :angel:

Wolfgang

 

I decided I wanted another parking track with a wooden tie backstop off the turntable. So, here is how it turned out. All out, I think it took an hour of work time over about four sessions to lay the track, wire it, build and add backstop, scenic, and add the weathering.

 

^That's a nice scene there. Time well spent.

 

Crandell,

If you had cropped the photo to eliminate the plywood at the bottom left corner you could have almost told me that you were out railfanning and shot this off a pedestrian bridge somewhere and gotten me to believe it.

Nice!

Adam

 

Adam and Kitbash, I gratefully acknowledge your positive feedback..thank-you kindly. :tb-rolleyes: I am facing what so many of us have to deal with before too much time passes after getting into the hobby...lackaruum. I keep getting locomotives. I have resolved to cull the herd a bit, but in the meantime, I have to have some room so that my staging doesn't get cluttered. So, this handy little addtion is, I agree, time well spent. It has turned out nicely, to my relatively new eye, so I was happy to share it with you. Believe it or not, it is the first substantial improvement in over 9 months.

Here is a lower shot including a J1d parked as intended. I wish I had a way to edit out the front wood, but it is a central operating pit close to the edge of the yard, so whaddaya do? I can't afford photoshop.

 

You can use simple cloning tools to change the foreground, and a smudge tool to alleviate the corner of the background. You might want to spend a little more time eliminating the obvious duplications.

 

Thanks, Pete, for the demonstration; it is surely an improvement. But, I didn't take Greek in school. :tb-wacky: Is this process available and simple to achieve?

-Crandell

 

The upper right part of this shot is absolutely photorealistic. The FA looks just like those I've seen in 1950s photos.