Check out Peter VanVliet's N scale P&C Railroad here. It is truly awe-inspiring: ======= http://users2.ev1.net/~pvanvliet/ ======= eNjoy
Don. That is a great link. I printed the instructions for hand made switches. I am still thinking about it. Might try one.
For the incredible amount of content, this is one of the best web sites I have seen. I spent about an hour there, and bouncing to other links provided. That's a long time for me.
Wow! The high quality of what is available to peruse turns the layout into quite an empire. I am very impressed with all the work the owner has done. Both on layout and web site. BoxcabE50
Peter posted this note on the n_scale group at Yahoo ========== From: Vanvliet <pvanvliet@ev1.net> Date: Sun May 19, 2002 3:28 pm Subject: Backgrounds on P & C Railroad Thanks to Don Brown's very kind message to this mailing list about our web site, we have received a lot of nice comments about the site and the layout. Today I received a question about how we did the backdrop on our layout. The person who asked me this question did not provide an e-mail address (he used the Comments form on our web site), so I have no choice but to answer to the whole list. However, it may be of interest to more people. We installed vertical 2 x 2's in the room, bolted to the room's studs. After we determined the layout height, we installed 1/8" Masonite board around the room. All but one of the corners had the Masonite just dead-end into the corner. One corner has a nice curve in it ("Penn Hills"). We (actually my wife) covered the seams and holes with drywall compound and tape, and covered the Masonite with at least two layers of primer and three layers of "Bride's Sky" blue. She decided on the paint color by walking in to Lowe's, grabbing a bunch of paint sample strips, walking outside the store, and comparing each one to the sky that day until we found the one that matched. Creative, and it worked! After about a year of not doing much to the background, we just finished spray painting clouds on the "blue sky" last week. Photos of these new clouds have not been posted on the web site yet. We used "bright white" and "flat white" spray paint we bought at Walmart for $0.94. We used New London Industries' cloud stencils. If you hold the stencils flush against the backdrop, you get sharp edges. If you hold them a bit away from the backdrop, you get less well-defined edges. The approach we liked the best was to first spray paint with the bright white using the stencils up against the backdrop. The bright white simulates the sun reflecting off of the top of the clouds. Next, using the stencils but offset downward about 4 inches, we used the flat white to create lower clouds that are a bit more dull. The flat white has a bit of a yellowish tint to it so it creates a nice 3-D feel to the cloud "layer". We also tried using a gray primer spray paint, but the clouds quite quickly turned into looming thunderstorms - a bit too depressing for a fun model railroad. After all the clouds were painted we sprayed flat white about a foot away from the backdrop over all of the clouds without a stencil. This dulled the edges of the clouds. Also, because the paint spray is falling down, it makes the area under the clouds hazier than the sky above. This has a nice subtle effect. Needless to say, our entire layout was covered with thin dropcloth to protect it from the spray. The other thing we have done is we have installed a few commercial photographic backdrops in the curved backdrop area (see "Penn Hills"). These are made by Backdrop Warehouse http://www.backdropwarehouse.com/ I have mixed feelings about these. They look nice, but they are hard to photograph because they reflect the camera's flash light. Some magazine articles have suggested spraying them with dullcote - we have not done that yet. Also, most of the ones we found are not well-suited for N-scale (too large). Anyway, I hope this answered the one person's question. Feel free to drop me an e-mail if you have any additional questions. We update our web site every few days, so feel free to drop by anytime. Thanks, Peter A. Vanvliet Email: pvanvliet@ev1.net Personal website: http://www.visualsage.com/mrr/ MRR Club website: http://www.visualsage.com/nwx/
