I’m planning a large rolling hill in one section of my layout which features a horseshoe curve alongside the perimiter of the hill and another one embedded inside the hill in a tunnel. I’d like to make a pop-up panel in the hill so I can acess possible derailments and for track/scenery cleaning purposes. What is the best way to do this? The layout is in N scale, my layout base is 4’ off the floor and the hill’s summit would be no more than a foot off the layout base.
Instead of a popup, try a dropout. This is a panel which can be unlatched and dropped out from below. I use one on my layout. It’s held in place by three barrel locks. When I need to access that area I simply slide the barrel locks open and drop the panel out and set it aside. When I finish I put it back in place. The structures on my dropout are lit. The power is supplied throiugh two of the barrel locks.
That’s inspired Jeffrey! Thanks for the idea.
Karl
Ok, I’ll bite…what’s a barrell lock?
I would assume its a sliding bolt that you would have on a door, or a garden gate. thats my understanding anyways.
Karl
In the areas I have foam mountains, I just build them to sit on a frame and the lift off. It also is nice for doing the detail on the workbench and then set them in place.
A barrel latch is a rod about the size of a pencil that slides in a holder into a loop on the other side to form a firm latch. They twist 1/4 turn to lock. I saw the as a boy on gates.
That’s exactly what it is. It’s the sliding bolt locks that you see on garden gates so often. They’re simple, cheap and they work.
Instead of an access panel, we built the mountains so that they could just lift off the layout. The lowest two layers of foam are fixed to the benchwork with canyons cut along the tracks, for the side walls of the tunnels. We’re in HO and this gives us 4 inches of vertical clearance inside the tunnels, with the portal area closed down to 3.5 vertical inches.
All foam layers above this are glued together as a unit which lifys off to access all the track underneath for cleaning and fixing derailments. We layed plaster cloth on the lowest two layers, with the upper layers removed from the layout, and let it dry. Then we draped Saran Wrap across the flat tops of the lowest two layers so that it hung over the edges and inch or so, and set the mountain-top units back in place.
After allowing two layers of plaster cloth to hang over the edge about half an inch, we smothed the wet plaster cloth down onto the plastic wrap with our fingers and let it dry. Then we lifted the mountaintops off the layout, removed the plastic wrap and set them back in place.
For smoothing and fine detail, we used lightweight spackling compound over the whole mountain, covering the plaster joint at the plus 4" level, and when it had dried for about 20 minutes, lifted the mountain top just enough to crack the drying plaster at the joint line.
The joints are barely visible in the dried plaster, and disappeared completely when covered with paint, trees and grass.
What we did here is actually more complicated than described above, instead of one liftoff section of mountain, there are six seperate ones as shown below. If you’re going to do this, you need to pay close attention to the sequence of removal before carving the foam and covering the joints, so you don’t “paint yourself into a corner”.
Jeff, using the barrel locks to secure the drop-out is clever, but using them to provide electrical power is brilliant.
I’ve also been working on the thin plaster-cloth technique to hide the seams of my lift-offs. I’m not as far along, but so far it seems to work pretty well. (I will have to remember the trick of lifting it a bit after 20 minutes - the last one was tough to separate after it hardened completely.) Since I’ve got lighting inside my subway tunnels, I’ve got to be careful about light leakage from the inside, and the plaster-cloth trick seems to help a lot with this, too.
Mr. B., the p[laster cloth joints used plastic wrap to maintain seperation, and are readily visible when complete.
The lightweight spackling compound is what ended up making the joints near invisible, and that was what tended to stick if not jiggled during the drying process.
I’m using Gypsolite for the overcoat to the plaster cloth. I like the gritty texture. I add a squirt of cheap dark brown acrylic to each batch, so the earth ends up a light tan. Yes, it’s the Gypsolite that masks the seam, but also makes it hard to remove if I let it set fully before removing it to split the seam.
I also cut the plaster cloth with scissors to get a non-straight edge. That, too, makes the seam less visible to the eye.
I also have been working on using a layer of plaster cloth over plastic wrap to make a cover-up piece for Atlas switch machines. It’s a bit tricky maintaining clearance, because the switch machines are actually pretty close to the clearance limits, and I don’t have as much room to work with as I thought I would. Still, it looks a lot better than the switch machine when it’s done.;
Make sure to pop the joints loose after painting too.
Some of our locos here actually touch the switch machines on the way past, just enough to hear a slight tic when it happens. We replaced all the nearside ones with hand throws, and the few that remain partially visible will end up painted, with maybe some plaster or brush to break up the outline further away from the track.