The breaker will be set against a mountainside, so will hopefully look balanced in scale with a large mountain adjacent. I'm really intrigued by The N Scale Architect's interlocking tower kits. I'm a tower fan, so will definitely have a few on my layout.
With an eye to economy, I adopted your idea in the form of a 1/2" Tall x 1/8" Thick x 24" piece of basswood with a scribed line down its length. I then fashioned posts of 1/8" Thick x 3/16" Wide strip stock so as to make the wall look more prototypical. I airbrushed it in a light white/gray, did a light weathering with chalks and glued it in place yesterday. I like how it turned out. My trainmen now have a safe place to walk and it provides some visual interest too. Its height is just above the embankment side, so it'll look legit holding back rip rap and I'll probably add some grass and weeds amongst the rock. None of that has been added. The black seen behind the wall is paint so as to hide any pink foam that may want to show in the side I cut away. Thanks again for everyone's ideas on this! I have other areas on the layout where I might use other methods.
I applied some scenic materials to the retaining wall embankment using some talus and bushes. I kinda envisioned the sort of rock and vegetation seen in the photo at the bottom. [Killian SC, 03/18/2016] It didn't quite turn out like in my picture, but I really like having the rock worked in there. The right-of-way will eventually have Kato ballast along the trackside.
Well sir, I'm impressed. That is looking great. The mix with the bushes, the rock, and the retaining wall is perfect!
I'm not at all done with scenery, but I need to take a break from it, so cleaned the jars, bags, glues and other junk off the layout and ran a train for the first time in many, many months. My Woodland Scenics RailPal track cleaner was busy, overcoming whatever schmutz had adhered to my track in places. I got out my Atlas Lackawanna TrainMasters, which hadn't run in 6 years and they did well. The coupler height is low on one; not sure what's up with that. It was really nice to see a train running on a semi-sceniced layout. Here are some poor quality random cell phone pictures.
Pic 2 looks real nice and except for grade, is finished? Especially like what you did with the rock section in between the shrubs or brush. Very natural. Similar to the rock section near the new retainer wall.
Thanks Mark, that's my Muleshoe Curve. I had a similar one on my previous layout and wanted to have one on new v3.0. Yes, that area is pretty much complete. There will be a short industrial spur into the area below of the curve and I want to choose one that is one story, so as to leave the curve open for pictures. I'm thinking of a transload area perhaps.
Agreed! One thing I've discovered is that I have a lot of work to do on my (DC) locomotive fleet. Most have been stored away (in a good spot indoors) for six years now and many that I tested sputtered their way around the layout. Maybe they'll improve with some simple run time. I'll look into my favorites first and worry with the others later.
It's great to see that trains were rolling on the DS&N sir. Just let me know if the JPT sub needs to divert any interchange traffic your way
That's an interesting mountain. What's it called Sorry, it was there, I could not help it! I apologize in advance
