Well fellas it has been quite some time since I’ve posted some progress photos of the layout construction.
Fife’s post on the Coffee pot regarding mountains made me rethink the area I’ve been working on and I decided to scrap the foam cliff face and go with the ceiling tiles instead.
This scene is in the far right corner of the train room, there are two tunnel portals, a cement wall, and a bridge planned here. Here you see the tunnel portal for the reversing loop:
This is looking back toward the corner, you get a good shot of the cement wall, and the subsurface for the bridge.
This shot is just past the reversing loop tunnel portal, eventually there will be a small station and water tower to the right of the track:
This is a shot of the cliff face:
Some of you may recall I had to redo The Three Sisters Bridges. The steel under girder bridge wasn’t doing much for me so I decided to go with some more mountain work… Here you can see some of the work:
This is a shot looking back toward the new tunnel portal coming up from the first level:
This is the car responsible for all the newly raised tunnel portals:
OK - so now back to the cliff. What I’m doing is building the ceiling tile cliff inplace, once I have the cliff face in the shape I like, I take a wire brush and lightly knock off an
Buckeye - the height is 5 1/8" from top of track to top of top container… and MTH, in their infinite wisdom forgot to check the clearance on their single and double tunnel portals - either that or they modeled the portals after those East of the Mississippi River as there isn’t enough clearance for the car to pass. They need about 1/4" more clearance for it to look good.
Dennis - I may if I can find some! I know C&O never ran these, but the car just looked neat and I couldn’t pass it up for the price ($20.00 - guess everyone figured they couldn’t run it on their layout).
Yeah tell me about it! When I first put the car on the tracks I thought I had plenty of clearance - till I caused one heck of a pileup/derailment/tunnel portal into water tower collision… what a mess. Just glad there was no damage done, and even more glad I found out BEFORE I had the tunnel portals in place and all the scenery completed!
That’s the style, B! Lookin’ sharp. May have to bring Lexi over to paint those walls.
Picture number 4 is remmeniscent of the west portal of Sand Patch Tunnel. The cut leading up to the bore is a brick red color. Perhaps check out some photos of that location before committing to the grey.
Sure NOW you post this AFTER I’ve been to Lowes to pick up the paint… [sigh]
Actually the paint I bought is for the tunnel portals and retaining walls. I’ll have to print some pics (the ones you sent) to get the right color(s)… but that sure looks nice! Especially with those Blue/Yellow/Orange engines, and the White/Red/Black didn’t look bad either!
To achieve the “Red Rocks” color in Cumberland, I first painted the ceiling tiles white (no reason you couldn’t use grey…) with latex (gots to have this or the tile will “drink” up the acrylics). Then I used a dark brown artist acrylic to add the color (several coats applied to get the color I wanted). Then a thinned down wash of black artist acrylic to fill in the joints, cracks and fissures.
Instead of posting suggestions, you would think that old HOUNDDOG that lives near you would come and help. After all, we all know he can do good work as he has been featured in CTT. [:-^] Too busy scratching fleas I guess. [(-D]
Here I was testing the look against the Chessie Special:
Here the entire cliff face has received a coat of the glue & sawdust mixture.
There is no glue between the layers, just on the cliff face. This technique seems to really hold up. It is still slightly flexible (the right edge against the tunnel portal could use a screw to pull it tight to the framing, but I’m leaving it as is for now to see if the rest of the scenery will prevent having to damage the cliff face. It is still strong, so this is why I’m not too worried).
Here it is Saturday morning with a coat of Stone Gray paint:
Close up shot:
Overview:
Put the Chessie GP-30s on the track and put the water tower back in place:
Coming out of the tunnel portal:
When this is done I think the scene will be rather impressive. The scene also took shape very quickly, you are looking at about 3.5 to 4 feet, approx 7 inches high, that was constructed in under 3 hours to this point. Over the next few days the transformation should be quite dramatic.
