To explain why this is important, and why it’s giving me a bit of trouble. I had my own business for 15 years. I had to give it up because of 4 back surgeries. I had a Photo Studio and considered myself creative. but 6 years of chronic pain and 6 years of meds, and lack of money, has kind of stiffled my creativity. I personally have no income, my Wife supports us. I mentioned to her that possibly I could build a small layout and sell it for Christmas in order to support my own train habit. She challenged me to do it. It’s all be done as inexpensively as possible. The biggest expense was the Thomas set which I got for the lowest possible Price of $49 for the deluxe set. Some of the lumber came from the cull pile at Lowes and Home depot, miscuts for $1-2 each. And some came from dumpster diving at construction sites. The 2’x8’ x 1" foam sheets were 1/2 price because some one sliced them when they opened the pack. The paint will be mis-mixed paint. The turnouts came from exchanging a bookrack I had to the LHS for the turnouts. I came up with a layout design I can live with, but now I’ve been staring at the pink desert for 2 days trying to come up with a scenery idea. Please help. Thank you. I promise, no more Violins Dave
Ok, so I’m building this layout HO, Thomas with passing siding. Now I’m brain froze on scenery. I watched Thomas on PBS today. He’s on the island of Sodor, so should I paint, scenic a beach and water all around the layout ? I thought about a dock or harbor. I’d like to have a water feature like a creek or river with a bridge over it. There will be a tunnel. I don’t have the $$$ right now for a turntable or fancy Victorian station. I did see that a Windmill is prominant on the intro scenes. It’s 4x6’ covered in 1" Pink Foam. I do plan on building up a tunnel and mountains if you suggest them with more foam, I ha
Last night I was fiddling away with some ideas for you and got a little carried away. I ended up making an entire track plan for you. I certainly hope I didn’t make your mind go into overload with any differences that it may have compared to your plan, but I tried to keep within the things that you mentioned in your post. I have the windmill in the bottom left corner, a quarry in the right, a mountain and tunnel hiding a hole in a scenic divider on the bottom half, a bridge hiding the same hole on the top. I tried to include a harbor area but to me it seems a little cluttered. I did keep the beach area on half of the layout and a creek with a bridge on the other. I included scenic elements as well to give you a start. Any of the water areas can be cut out directly out of the foam and tapered to resemble the location (ie, straight, flat walls in the harbor and natural, free flowing in the creek and beach areas. Although there are many structures on the layout, and nice looking kits can become expensive, you can make all of these structures using cardboard or paper. They may not look as nice as kits, but they will give you a finished layout in a short time and a limited budget.
There is a station up front on the beach side that could service Thomas and his short passenger train with Annie and Clarabell, and the quarry can service some of the “troublesome trucks.” Switching opportunities can be fairly interesting, and can include such things as Thomas running around the layout, stopping every few laps at the station. Then, you can have Thomas drop off his train and pick up unloaded trucks from the harbor and run around to the quarry to have them re-loaded. Thomas could then head back to his train and run around for another few laps, then stop at the stat
Ghonz, thank you so much for your effort. This is great. I’ll start with the turnouts I have now, and add more later. I sent you an email, please disregard. The image wouldn’t show up in IE 6.5 but it worked fine in Firefox 1.5. This was very thoughtful and helpful. It jogs the mind out of nuetral. You have a great future ahead of you. Thanks, again. Dave in PA
I do not know of any spray paints that are foam compatible; the Krylon Fusion line may be a possibility. It is supposed to be plastic compatible.
You are probably better off getting latex paint. Like your lumber source, check with the hardware store to see if they have some paint that was mixed incorrectly in tan, brown or green colors. Also dark blue for water.
Thanks to your feedback I got out of nuetral and made some progress today. First I went to the Home Depot and got Green, Brown, and Blue mismixed paint for $1.00 each. Then I came home and using Ghonz’s ideas I laid out a creek, harbour, beachhead, and quarry. I got past my it’s got to be perfect, and onto any movement forward is a learning step. I painted a base coat of green, and then spread with my hand and breath Life Like grass particles from probably the 60’s or 70’s that I had laying around. As time went on I got better with it. Then I chisled out the creekbed and Harbor, and lined them with plaster impregnated cast material. Then I put out a request on how to dilute glue to spray over the grass to keep it down, 3:1 water to glue plus a little detergent I’m told. Then I screwed up and tried to shake off the excess too soon. This made clumps of grass and bare spots. So know I need to find out how to fill those in. But I’m allowing it to dry probably 48 hours, because I have to work outside and it’s supposed to rain tonight and tomorrow here in PA, USA. But most importantly It’s moving ahead. My Backs killing me from hunching over the layout but I had a good productive day. Thank you all pushing me forward., Dave
Thanks very much for the compliment! [:)] I’m really glad I got you thinking and working on the scenery. By the sounds of it you’re doing great. You’re really moving ahead. Good luck and enjoy the process. In the meantime, I have to get back to my layout!
This link might help as will the new range of Hornby Thomas buildings
I would suggest borrowing some books from your local library particularly ones that have good pictures of the Isle of Man as the scenery etc on Sodor would be very similar.
Remember all Thomas stock should be UK type stock and any loco you want can be created by picking the right UK one and painting it correctly, the original locos did not have faces.
This will make creating the ones you cannot get as easy as a repaint.
Ditto on what G Paine said about the paint. I bought a gallon of mis-mixed tan acrylic latex for $5. And Ghonz, GOOD JOB! As a hostess of a now defunct kiddie show used to say, "You’re a good do-bee! (not to be confused with a doobie…)
Dave