That looks to be Styrofoam and not extruded closed cell foam (usually pink or blue insulation). Styrofoam is made from a bunch of little balls of foam and when you start shaping it...it lets the little balls fly free (makes a static electric mess). I ONLY use the extruded foam for scenery material because I can shape it with sandpaper, knives, and sanding blocks to look exactly how the scenery is going to be. Then it's just a matter of covering it with scenery! Lay your tracks first, but then bring on the foam for the landscape.
Tracks or terrain first... Neither. Laying tracks without considering why they are laid that way can lead to difficult or unrealistic terrain choices. Creating terrain first then making the track fit is not any better. Track-planning software is very useful here, I use XtrackCAD, which is free, and worth every penny! But when planning your track placement, think about how terrain would fit around your track, and how realistic it might be. and be prepared to alter the trackage to account for it. In the 1:1 world, and especially in early eras, modifying terrain to put a railroad through was very expensive and time consuming, so the two were inextricably linked: the terrain dominated where the tracks could be laid. In hilly/mountainous terrain, track lengths often doubled or more the actual straight-line distance traversed between two points. Also in the 1:1 world, water creates most terrain (erosion from run-off, creeks/rivers, etc.) Study topological (contour) maps of 1:1 railroads to see how they dealt with it. But the railroads also had to deal with the same water obstacles, whether it be bridges or trestles, or drainage features and culverts to deal with runoff. On a topo map, water flows at right angles to the topo lines. So if your track is cut into the side of a hill, there has to be drainage ditches (uphill side of tracks) and culverts to keep the runoff from washing out the tracks. Boulders and rock fill are used to line erosion-prone areas. When dealing with creeks and rivers, remember that the outside of river bends generally have steeper banks, and the inside of the bends have more gradually sloping banks. This is a natural effect of water flowing faster around the outside (eroding faster), and slower on the inside (dropping sediment load). Water seldom flows in a straight line before it wants to start meandering back and forth, even in perfectly flat terrain. Of course man wants to divert water and force it into straight canals, which usually have to be lined with heavy gravel or concrete to stay that way.
Suggest you spend as much time planning where water features go as you do on track configuration. Avoid having water with no outlet, Dead Sea effect. Joe
I would also discourage having long straight tracks parallel to the edge of the layout. Even if you can just rotate the trackage a few degrees, it can surprisingly make a big visual difference, and provides some diversity of space around the layout (more at one end on a side than the other, etc.)
It's been a long time since my last post so I decided it was time for an update. First of all, the buildings. My wife's been working on a ton of new buildings. She even re-did some of the first ones because the scale was not right. Most of the buildings are modeled after real buildings in Akihabara. Others, after real building somewhere else in Japan, and a small minority are just made up. Here are some assorted buildings... And in case you are wondering, yes, that round one in the top right with the helipad on top is going to have a track running through it. Too crazy? It is modeled after the Gate Tower Building in Osaka which has a highway going through it. And here are some of my favorites, and their real life counterpart... The GO GO KARE The Gundam Cafe The Nakagin Capsule Tower She also did the "bridges", they are not really bridges, but I'm not sure how to call the elevated supports for the tracks even in my native tongue. Even the track plans have changed since my last post. There was a very short detour that didn't really add much in my opinion, so I took it away. Well, actually I removed the straight track, and left the "detour" in place. Also, since I only had one set of wired unijoiners, and I wanted to avoid ordering more of them from abroad, I decided to make three more pairs myself. The first one was a pain in the back, it probably took me over an hour to do it, but that provided the practice to do the others faster.
We also started adding some elevation to the terrain. Just beyond the city limits, there will be an abrupt increade in height where the elvated tracks will join the ground, then there is soft down gradient that leads to another mostly flat area on the opposite end of the layout. We had finished pasting all the styrofoam pieces and then I realized I forgot to consider the inclination of the track... So we had to detach the pieces and repeat the process. Finally, on the city we decided that we are going to print the floor and paste it on the layout. There is simply too much level of detail to paint it. I was unsure of this at first, but after printing a couple of pages I was convinced by the result, and I'm confindent it will look much better when we start adding 3D objects, like benches, lamposts, and people. Here is one of the images I did (scaled down). Again, I tried to emulate the real sidewalks and street markings in Akihabara. And this is more or less how it's going to look like on the layout: Well, I think that covers most of what we've been doing the past month or so. Hope you enjoy the update!
Really nice. Enjoying this as eventually I’d like to do something with my TyPE 500 EVA besides gaze lovingly at the box.
Yeah, I have tons of it and a little background story. A couple of years ago I rented a place to start a business. The place used to be an office with a decent server and 40 or so workstations and they had left all the wiring in place. We had to remove but I decided to save it. I could be wrong, but I think I have more than a hundred meters of it. The business didn't work out. But at least I have CAT5 for the rest of my life
OMG!!! Pictures please! We wanted to buy that, but we changed our minds when we saw the price. I can't complain though, we got to ride on it. I actually have a video of my wife literally crying of happiness as the train arrives at the station.
Price be damned... When I do have the money that isn't earmarked for anything this train will be MINE!! I second the notion you need to post pics!
A hot knife works wonders in cutting Styrofoam with no issues in beading. and cutting extruded foam also. Also works well for shaping terrain and making creek beds. The trick is to let the knife do the work and not try to force it fast. Nice and slow does the trick. https://www.amazon.com/GOCHANGE-Ele...d=1&keywords=hot+knife&qid=1607963332&sr=8-31 I have used these for years.
