Last time I was working on hiding the rear of the layout underneath a new raised town scene…
Since then I’ve tidied up the corners so it’s not so square and added a retaining wall and ‘tunnel’ mouth. (above). I’ve not laid any new roadways, paving or grass scenics yet as I’m going to wait until I get a few more buildings to plan it all out. In the meantime I’ve added a townscape back-scene – you can pick these up very cheap and they add plenty more depth to your layout. Continue reading
Last time you caught me in the middle of upgrading the scenery and rearranging the layout’s buildings and town plan. Coupled with the addition of a new road bridge, this brought depth and a better focus to the layout.
As scenery development continues, I still have one problem left to deal with…
The act of adding a new outer oval of track has truncated my original level crossing (seen bottom right in the above image). This is further hampered by the height difference of the two baseboards. Whilst it’s still possible to model the completion of the level crossing over the outer oval it’s going to prove tricky to get it to look right. I thought long and hard about how to do this.. modelling plastics maybe, carefully shaping some strip wood perhaps.. but no stand out ideas emerged. Continue reading
So this is where we are up to. The new outer loop is fully operational, albeit with some scenery still to be completed. The layout now has capacity to run 3 trains and is controllable from my desk.
It has long been my intention to add in some ‘height interest.’ Let me explain… If I was going to start again from scratch I’d hide half the layout behind some scenery, a wall or hill perhaps. Trains would disappear behind such a wall and reappear elsewhere which would look visually more realistic than being able to see the full oval. This after all is how many modellers design their layouts. Continue reading
A quick update to detail the completion of the Outer Oval Extension from last episode.
The new line is now fully operational. As you’ll notice in the above photo, not all the landscaping has been finished. This is first to allow for the level crossing to be extended (how this will work I’m not sure yet due to the height difference). Secondly, I’ve not decided how to model over the join in the two boards. Previously I’ve laid ballast first leaving the track to be placed on top. (This picture illustrates that). This works but makes the track uneven in places so I may investigate other methods – perhaps painting and adding railings to create a faux bridge. Continue reading
In the last Episode I was testing the new outer oval and experimenting with building gradients out of cork floor tiles.
As this was a success it’s time to start modelling the base board. As this is going to be a fairly big job, and to give myself more space whilst I do it, I’ve dismantled both the layout to work on one half at a time. Continue reading
Calling All Stations 