Mike,
Wow! Think Pink! Enjoy seeing your skillful progress, if only there were more hours in a day.
Regards, Peter
Wow mike! My head’s still spinnin’… You are a man on the move. Stand back, the railroads a’ comin’!
Makes my HOn3 slow, snail’s pace efforts with its fits and starts seem like effectively zero activity. I will follow with great interest. Again, Wow!
Richard
Peter and Richard,
Thanks for you comments! I try to use techniques that speed things up and often fit into the “good enough” category.
My lighting is one example. I’m sold on the effectiveness and ease of using the LED strip lighting. I comes in different forms, but the plug-n-play stuff I use is quick and very easy… I did solve my problem of a transition for the light strip past the old doorway and ducking under a duct. I used a piece of 1/2" plywood, because it fit a handy pres-to-fit gap around the door frame. Sky paint and a couple of screws to hold it to the ceiling with a cleat, then add a couple of J-hooks to keep the light strip from sagging and it’s good.
Then I primed a bunch of styrofoam mountains and painted them. The key to this work is using a good primer that is compatible with foam. I used Zinsser Bulls-eye 1-2-3. You have to coat every nook a cranny of what you’ll spray paint or the solvent will start eating at the foam. Nothing’s ever perfect and it’s not like the whole thing will melt. Prime your styrofoam twice for good coverage. Use a puff of air to pop any bubble-ups you get, don’t touch them.
Mountains past Crater Lake
Mountains behind Crater lake Junction
Mountains behind Camp 13
Mountains behind BlackCat Junction townsite, plus peek around corner shows I’m still thinking about how to
Mike,
Thanks for pointing out the lighting, looks good. What are you using for light color (temperature)?
Your Pink foam is giving me some good ideas going forward. Black Hawk is next on list and I’m thinking now of doing what you did with the foam. I also need to add a 4’ lift out section in front of door. Needed to extend Black Hawk for 50 Gold Mine Mill and connect to north Black Hawk and Gilpin tram.
On the Derrick, is that a kit? Need one for Silver Plume and that looks good.
Thanks Cameron / AKA Rabbi
Cameron,
These are list as Daylight, but not sure of exact color temp. They do look very good to my eye and I’m kind of picky about that. The terrain colors are pretty garish right now, before they get worked over with several passes of scenicking, so don’t let that throw you.
I’ve got lot more scenery primed and drying right now. Should have some new variations in pics tonight. It’s not quite perfect – except for those wonderful silhouette mountains – to seal and paint the styrofoam, but that gets fixed as you move forward. Procrastinating on scenery is something that I think scares some folks off of starting, when you really just need to jump in and give it a try. I know you know that, because I’ve seen your nice work. What I like is finding even quicker, easier results, although they’re often mash-ups of old techniques. Nothing wrong with mixing it up. Most of my foreground will still be mostly Sculptamold over the pink, because it’s tougher and has better textures in most cases, but the pink does make some nice rocks it you hack at it just right.[:)]
The derricks are included in the Walthers Midstate Marble Products kit (933-9073), but you get just one per kit and I don’t think it was available separately. It’s OOP, but shows up on that auction site regularly. I’ve actually got one more I may or may not use, but will keep you in mind first if I do decide it’s surplus.
Mike … Amazing work! Thanks for sharing.
Garry,
Thanks! I try to keep 'em coming back by thinking in terms of bang for the buck. Hard to beat styrfoam and spray paint.[swg] But I’ll also layer on these as I add textures and colors to them, so they just get better with age.
I promised Cameron some new pics. I would have had them up earlier, but I forgot to pull the pit parts, so still had a pink pit. I know that sounds alluring, but it was made in total innocence[A]…that’s exactly what happened. I could have constrained the camera angle and hid my shame[:$] but I decided just to be upfront about it. And we do get to stare down into a proper white pit. The whole quarry needs some weathering, but it and a lot of “dirt” laid down with the spray can really has things looking good.
Here’s a shot of Crater lake Junction with all the backdrop mountains now painted.
Dropping down to Crater Lake proper and its quarry provides this view.
Now we’re looking down into the quarry pit. Needs some broken stone and a little standing water, plus some stone cutters at work.
That’s it for now. Two bundles of hard to find ME code 70 HOn3 track showed up today (Thanks, LocoDoc!) so I’ve got to get the track crew back to work, despite a shortage of hardware expected in another shipment.
Got the scenery base mostly finished after picking up 6 more pounds of Sculptamold. Good number to know in relation to all the pink it covered in these shots.
All the liftouts are marked to show what protrudes above the subroadbed by a line drawn there on each. The first layer of foam put down is usually the critical one for fit, so you don’t want to add Sculptamold below the line except when it’s needed to fill a gap above it. It’d just be wasted.
The narrow places at the beginning of where spurs diverge can be dealt with by gluing down a small plug of foam to fill the gap between it and the beginning of the liftout. One is in the foreground and another at the far right on the end of the liftout shown.
In places where you still have a small gap to fill between the liftout and the subroadbed, I use plastic wrap underneath the liftout. The free end is draped across the roadbed, then Sculptamold is used to fill the gap. by sticking it to the liftout. Sometimes you can get plastic all the way across and do both sides at once.
The result looks like the next pic. It’s important to lift the liftouts at each stage to verify fit again before the Sculptamold gets too hard. Here you can see the added edge is “sharp” looking. It’s prone to later chipping off, unless you take a sponge and smooth it down to remove the sharp edge.
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Here’s another pic I promised Cameron earlier when he was asking about my line voltage LED light strips. I had them slopped up just to get some illumination, but needed to go back and tune how the “cable” sits in the clips.
Basically, I treat the LEDs in the cable as if it’s a long row of tiny spotlights. It’s designed for use in installations where the light will go 180 degrees away from the mounting surface. But you can use the supplied clips and various Xmas tree light holders to twist the cable so it points where you want it to go, within reason. Any clips and pressure applied to the cable must treat it with care. You don’t want to damage it
It’s a little hard to describe, but I showed how I do this in some pics on the second page on my Night Scene thread. Along with lots more info, this is at:
Making good progress, looking good.
Thanks Cameron
Things have been moving right along with the Cascade Branch, although I’m behind on web updates. Let me rectify that.
As usual, I take advantage of opportunities to force perspective. Here are two shots that show how adding some of the evergreen tree stickers helps provide an angle on what will be the dozer trail into the woods in this scene.
I also added some distant mountain stickers in between my 3-D peaks.
The next pic isn’t even on the cascade Branch, but it is related. It’s the sawmill where logs off the branch are cut. I badly needed some more operational flexibility than the siding with two spurs provided to accommodate the growth in traffic. Fortunately, I had almost enough room to drop another siding in between the main and existing siding. I softened up the matte medium binding the ballast on the main and slid it over about 1/4" so cars will clear each other on adjacent tracks. Now I have a storage track so MT cars and outgoing loads have a place while maintaining use of the passing siding for traffic off the main.
I reached the end of track at the Crater Lake quarry, too. I decided to lay the main all the way through, then will come back and lay sidings, etc as I can afford the track components. Laying and wiring track later is easy to do with all the lift-outs I built in.
Testing motive power on the branch was interesting. It’s
Mike - really enjoying following along with this. It’s hard to believe that you’ve been working on the extension for only a few months. If you ever run out of things to do, you can always build that Precision Scale kit that’s on your shelf! Looking forward to more!
I appreciate your comments. Thanks! That stack is my ready line-up, which means it’ll probably get built sooner rather than later. As you’ve noted, I’ve been busy on the layout.[:D] I tend to go back and forth in what’s interesting me to build. There’s that other DL535 kit, which would make an interesting pair with its built twin. I actually need the tank cars more right now and they’re a pretty easy build IIRC.
One of the neat features of the branch is the way it forces me to use Silverton as the base for operations on the branch. In real life, there’s the Cascade wye. In my case, the track is forced to do without that amenity and the turnout faces Silverton. There’s no way to have a loco lead all the way from Durango onto the branch. It must either swap the locos and caboose at Tefft – OK for diesels, not so much for steam – or proceed to Silverton and use the wye there to orient the locos properly before heading up the branch.
I’m thinking that log trains to the mill and pole trains to the creosote plant will likely shuffle at Tefft and avid Silverton. Passengers will run through from Red Mountain to Silverton to Crater Lake, with a stop at Tefft. Freight will be handled by the Rio Grande between Silverton and Crater Lake. Going to be fun.
It’s been awhile since I updated. I’ve been working on some other projects, but also have been doing some work on the Cascade Branch, so we’ll catch up now.
The end of the line is just the end of the line for now. Hoping to fund the turnouts and switch machines still needed (about 2 dozen). Meanwhile, the fact that most of the scenery is composed of liftouts makes it easy to start detailing it. In the meantime it is the world’s best scenicked staging track.
The bulldozer has been working on the roadbed for the track up to Camp 13 from Crater Lake. I also tried out some bumpy chenille trees that worked very effectively. I can see hundreds more of those in my future.
I did have some unseemly gaps at several points along the roadbed.
A very easy solution is to take ground foam and glue it to one side of the gap. or the other. That’s leaves everything free to liftout.
Finally, run some locos through just to verify clearances.
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If you’ve been following along so far, you’ll probably remember the 6’+ long liftout. Here’s a pick of it “burping.”[:)]
This is where all the liftouts really earn their keep. It would have been difficult to lean over Purgatory to reach some place my back would’ve said was H***[}:)] after planting 100s of trees.
Fortunately, I lifted it out – duh – and set it where I could reach it easily.
Here’s after I added 150 trees.
Fortunately, the trees cost about 2 cents a piece. They’re made from bumpy chenille, a pipecleaner-type product. Nothing really original, just Google “bumpy chenille trees,” but it’s a great trick to have up your sleeve when you need a lot of forced perspective. And your budget is tight.
The mountains grow more convincing:
Mike,
I didn’t even know those huge mountains were removable. Thats amazing! Very cool idea what you did here.
Michael,
Yeah, about 85% of the layout surface area is removable. This makes it easy to go ahead and do scenery. I can easily come back later and doing tracklaying, wiring and ballasting then just be disassembling the part of the RR that needs attention.
All it is is styrofoam over L-girder. I try to make the base of each out of 2" styrofoam, but sometimes use thinner. I cut it so it fits well the area it’s covering and is well supported and level. Then it’s all skewers and adhesive as I build it up. I use Sculptamold over the foam. The result is light and strong. That big, long liftout is maybe 20 pounds or just a little more.
Some 1200+ trees later, I’ve got some more pics. Here’s the mountain behind Purgatory before I added trees.
Here it is after trees.
Again, easier to add trees by being a liftout.
What’s behind the curtain?
Some of the liftouts are keyed together for ease of construction and to hide seams. Here’s a long skinny one that must come out before the previous mountain can be lifted out.
And a train runs through it.
The theme this time is testing and tuning track on grades. In a certain sense, I want to say, “Don’t try this at home…” unless you’re building a layout like this one that incorporates lots of liftouts. Most people with a layout at this stage with all the scenery also have it firmly locked in place. If that’s the case with your methods, then imagine what you are about to see as stripped back down to the wooden L-girder framework…
Plans for the Cascade Branch were minimal, but did include choosing curvature and grades that reflect the mountain prototype (although this is a fictional line, it’s part of the Silverton area terrain) as well as the limitations of scaling down models. The locos I designed the branch around were the Blackstone HOn3 C-19 and (in the future) Shays. I could have gone tighter in radius and sharper on grades if it were a Shay-only enterprise, but it’s basically a 20" radius/2.5% maximum gradient in terms of my givens and druthers.
I knew trains would be short, so planned on having 3 freight cars and a caboose as one goal.
For passenger trains, I wanted the C-19 to be able to heft 2 cars uphill, a RPO/Baggage/Express and a coach.
While building sub-roadbed and laying and wiring track, I also tested my work with a K-27 and passenger car, because I wanted to be certain of clearances and the ability to also handle bigger locos. I also used an electronic level able to show grade to within 0.1%. Everything checked out in general. I proceeded to building my scenery, which in my case meant building lots of liftouts.
So hold it right there…
If you build scenery with conventional methods that leave it fixed firmly in place, before you start you should do what I did AFTER building my scenery, you should test with the exact configuration of train (motive power, cars of rolling stock, etc) you
For those wondering about the limestone blocks, they are balsa, sawn to size and painted flat white.
What size? Checking the internet gave my 163 pounds per cubic foot for limestone. So a block that is 4x4x16 gives just over 20 tons, the rated capacity of these flatcars. I just thought thought I’d make the first batch as 4x4x8 so they can go one over each truck. These are a good size for cutting dimensional stone from. The next batch will be the 4x4x16, plus some 3x3 ones as they should work well as raw material for turning columns from.