So after a great event at the Allegheny Ukulele Soiree, I'm working on some updates to that content and will be preparing a video series around the topic of creating your own custom songbook with ChordPro.
In the mean time as I'm working on that for all of the great Ukulele players out there looking for some handy links:
Inglenook switching or shunting puzzles can be a fun way to spend some time. They can be easily setup with a few packages of model railroad track. You could also set one up with wooden railroad track or just paper and strings.
At it's core a 5-3-3 Puzzle has 8 cars (wagons) and one locomotive. You need to make a train consist up with 5 cars in a specific order, but the pieces of track can only hold so many cars each so you have to work at moving things around to build your train.
Some people like to just pull tags out of a hat to decide on their final train makeup, while that works I've put together a small web app that lets you save and reload your cars and randomize your output train. It's available on my website at: https://www.smythenet.com/ig-select/
So if you're looking for a fun activity for an afternoon or weekend to keep busy, check out Inglenook puzzles and my selector app.
So I've settled on a new track plan for around the tree. It's a neat little three time around loop with some tunnels and hills and trees. As I said in my last post I don't plan on this being for realistic operations, it's mainly for display purposes at Christmas time and for constant running. The primary audience will be kids and people who are not really into operations. So if you want to be critical about the track arrangement feel free but remember it's not meant to be realistic just real nice looking.
So lots of new projects going on lately. On the railroad front I have two major projects going on. First I'm working on an around the tree layout for Christmas. N scale of course. The track plan calls for nearly 30 feet of "mainline" that will loop around three times. I would like to be able to have one or two trains running on this at a time for display purposes only. It's meant to look good and not necessarily be realistic or operable.
On the operations side I'm still considering a point to point shelf layout for operations. I'm thinking of a proto-freelanced shelf based on Latrobe, PA and the mixture of the Ligoneer Valley Railroad, Pennsylvania Railroad Latrobe/Unity/Hostetter branches and the West Penn Railways lines. This will be a big undertaking so I'm doing some experimenting on the around the tree layout for some additional practice.
I'm also working on converting some more engines to DCC and building a DCC sound car. I have some older life like locomotives that I like and work well and I would like to be able to run on my layout. Since my NCE Powercab doesn't have support for DC I needed to get some more equipment updated.
I'm going to work on some more write ups about all these and I'll be posting them with pictures and links sometime soon.
So admittedly I haven't done any modeling, railroad or otherwise recently. My little layout has been sitting in the corner mostly untouched for months, and my track sketches for a larger more robust layout have been sitting on a shelf or in my My Documents folder also for months. There are doubtless many reason for it, but a large one is likely that the Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Years Holidays all just were here, and I have a nice new TV and Netflix account that I have been enjoying with the family.
One of the "new" things we have discovered on Netflix is Doctor Who. We started with the 2005 Series and have worked both forward and backward in the series. I think we've seen the first, second, third, fourth and ninth Doctors thus far.
Back on the model railroading front most of what I've done has been around operations. I joined OpSig this year in an effort to learn more about operations and maybe even find some local groups that I can guest operate with for a session or two to learn the ropes (if you know of any in Western PA please let me know). While learning operations and building a layout that allows me to run a good session is a goal I have to admit that Structure building really is what I enjoy the most about the hobby. So after breaking all the ice on the drive way and realizing that I was just too sore to do anymore around the house this weekend I thought about pulling out some card stock scratch building supplies and just messing around when I had a great idea. Why not build something that me and the kids would get a kick out of on the layout. Something we had been enjoying on TV currently, say an n-scale TARDIS.
Here is a picture of the mostly finished product on my layout. It's sitting under a tree near the train station. I can't help but think that this just might be the first time the Doctor has been in Pennsylvania. The base needs a bit of trimming and molding to the layout still, but that will come with time as I decide where to keep this piece at.
Here's a close up of the piece. The TARDIS itself came from a Deviant Art site, the sidewalk came from Scale Scenes, one of my favorite sources for card stock modeling products. The figures I bought online from a guy named Jens in a big multipack. They have been custom painted to match the scene as the Ninth Doctor and Rose. If you want to duplicate this Take the Image from Deviant Art and scale it to around 900 DPI. I did some simple math and a bit of trial and error to get that figure. If you want you can do what I did and rotate the page so that it's square to the TARDIS pattern and cut it down and then print it out to the right height. I found that somewhere around 1.6 in high for the pattern was pretty good to make the Doctor's head be at about the right height on the door. All in all this was a quick project that I just threw together with the kids so that we weren't totally bored this weekend while my shoulder was healing from all the work around the house. It was pretty fun to watch the kids look for it on the layout after I installed it too. Even my four year old was able to find and it recognize it. While it's simple, made of paper and not the greatest it does look nice when viewed from the 2 foot rule. Now let's just hope some major disaster doesn't follow the Doctor to West Forge.
So in case you missed it I built a paper Acella a while back, and today while I was looking around the web I found another very cool paper train paper. a paper GG1 over at a place called Creative Park. Below is a picture of theirs. Once I put one together I'll take pictures and put them up here. In the meantime why don't you head on over and make one yourself.
In a really neat way some researches have found a great way to use a normal everyday item for a lot of us in a whole new way. The Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory used a model train engine with some californium-252 on it to test their neutron sensors in their fusion reactor. Being a train enthusiast who has a Bachelors in Applies Physics I find this doubly interesting.
First off Happy New Year everyone! I hope that everyone has a great holiday weekend.
Now onto the topic of my post. I have to admit that aside from playing with my kids Thomas train layout I've never really operated a layout of any type except for the ones that went in circles underneath Christmas trees. I do recall as kids my sister and I making the train or the trolly car go around a few times and then stopping it at certain spots that we decided were stations to pickup and drop off passengers. However, I've never done anything that I would really consider operations. The club I belong to doesn't do operations yet, and I don't seem to know anyone in the western PA area that does this at home. If you happen to be in Western PA and in need of crew member let me know.
Anyway, having never done this before and using a track plan from a book I was left with trying to figure all this out myself (aren't model railroading books great!). I have to say I was really hoping that I liked it after I went through all the work to build this stuff and get it running well. So today after watching a movie with the kids and my wife I sat down with a notebook, pencil and track plan and tried to figure out how to operate my little module. The very first thing I realized is that this module lacks anything that even resembles a run around. This was clearly another rookie mistake on my part that meant that all my switching moves had to be pre-planned and the cars positioned properly in the consist. Once I got over that problem I was able to come up with a 12 step operation plan that involved switching four locations: Nathan's Warehouse, C & E Hardware, The General Store/Railway Express Agency, and the Lumber Yard.
After my kids went to bed I decided that it was time to try this plan out. My original goal when I started planning this layout was to be able to operate the layout for 15 minutes with a crew of 1 person. I was pretty sure my plan would do that and maybe take even longer. In the end though the operation plan took just over 12 minutes to complete, but that time didn't include using the passenger station at all. I decided that I can either add passenger operations to this plan or change that siding to an additional small industry to add a few more minutes to the operations. Overall though I'm very pleased with the way things worked. I found a few small track issues I need to work on on the spurs, but aside from that I had a very pleasant 12 minutes running my trains in more than just a loop.
I do think that larger scale operations would be a great deal of fun, and look forward to trying those someday. All of this makes me happy as I have a better understanding of operations now, and that just became one more thing that I have learned from this little 2'x3' layout.
So it has really been ages since I made a decent post about things. I think I will rectify that today. I'd like to post a bit about all the scenery I have been working on for my little module. Since this is now complete I'm going to go over it rather quickly in just one post. First I'll start with a quick picture of my test fit of all the structures I planned to use. I used some miscelaeous items to stand in for trees and some buildings are just pieces leaning together to help me plan out the space. Honestly I think I redid this process several times as the buildings took shape and I began to have better understanding of how to utilize the space. Next time I'll probably make cardboard cutouts of the footprint of each building to start with as that would have been easy to keep taped to the foam while I was working on the track.
Once the celluclay goop mixture was good and dry I began adding paint and ground foam to the layout. I think I did this step too early actually, some of the buildings weren't ready yet, and in all honesty the track needed a lot of work still, but that's another post. Here are two shots, one of the church area and one of the whole module with it's ground foam in place.
The ground foam is a mixture of Wood Scenics and Life Like greens and dry/dead grass with some sifted sand mixed in in some areas. The still unfinished road way is actually cardstock that I printed on my printer and glued to the layout. It came from http://www.scalescenes.com a site that I highly recommend. Even if you don't want to use card stock buildings (which you should consider using anyway) The add ons like interior carpet and paintings are worth it.
Finally here is a picture taken after the trees were added to the hill and station area. This is looking down from the hillside onto the rest of the layout. The tree bases are not yet sceniced, I'll probably paint them and put some additional ground foam around them to conceal them a bit more. That's about it for today, I'll try and get some more up soon. On a side note I did have this module out and running this Christmas. I didn't have it under the tree it actually sat on a cabinet on the far side of my fireplace, but looking back at last years post about "Being Happy with what you have/an N-Scale under the tree" I felt it important to note that West Forge itself was my families Christmas tree train display. The kids enjoyed it quite a bit as did I.
So work has been progressing on my layout even though I haven't made a post in ages. I was working on improving the hill and cut that I built into the original foam layout. The hill was covered with Celluclay and latex paint originally. It always seemed too flat and lacking something. I used the ground goop I created before to add more texture to the hill and area on top of it. I did a lot of pulling away with sticky fingers on the slope to add a rocky look to it and just some texture to the top.
Once it dried I painted it brown, then washed black over that and washed raw sienna over that. The top of the hill was painted plain raw sienna. I really liked the color of the top. Might be a bit too golden looking for Western PA, but it was much better thant he light tan I originally used. I think I'll look for a color closer to that for any future projects I work on. Finally I did a good bit of dry brushing grays and browns accross the front slope and sides and added some shadows to the nooks and crannies. Admitedlly the whole thing had a very "prehistoric" look to it which I was worried about but the next step really blended it all together better.
The final step was ground foam. I used 4 different foams on the hill, bright green, dark green, dried grass and earth. In addition to that I used some fine sand I had left over from the ground goop for added texture. The whole mass was sprayed down with Wet Water (using rubbing alcohol not soap) and then doused with a good layer of watered down glue. Any foam that was "run off" from the top and settled on the slopes I left in place and hit with the watered down glue. I added some additional foam to the slope to enhance that by putting full strength glue and sprinkling sand and various greens onto it.
I was very happy with the end result. It did retain a bit of the big fake hill look, but a lot of the road cuts in south western PA where I grew up look a lot like this. So with that I called this part of the project a success and prepared to move onto installing the road through the town.
So I've decided that I need to start getting the terrain laid out on my layout so that I have a better idea how the structures and trees will fit in. I opted to use a variation of Lou Sassi's Ground Goop mainly because I had the needed supplies on hand. I mixed the goop up as follows:
1 part Celluclay 1 part latex paint 1 Part tube sand 1 cap Lysol Water to thin as needed Acrylic Art paints to darken the color *in this case 1 part = 1 cup
Like I said I had this stuff on had. The tube sand came from my truck, it was an old tube that is falling apart so I scavenged a few scoops of the sand from the ripped bag. It was a bit on the course side. I think next time I might screen it a bit to get the large stones out first as they made the goop a bit more rocky in some areas than I wanted. The latex paint was the left over light tan I used to cover the blue foam. I felt it was too light so I put a few older watered down tubes of brown and black acrylic paint to try and darken it. It made things more gray rather than more brown. Next time I'll get a darker latex for my base. Closer to Raw Sienna I think
Here is the results.
Over all I'm please. I need to clean up the areas where the structures will go, but this has tuned my flat sheet of foam board into something a bit more natural and earthly looking.
Next will be ground foam, some asphalt for the street and I think I'm going to repaint the rail head and ties to be a better color. I'm really not sure why I did such a red color for that.
Well over the last few weeks I got back into working more on my n-scale West Forge, PA layout. I added some new 1x4 lumber to the base to strengthen the module after the "Earthquake" ripped a fault line across the town. Since that time the town has rebuilt itself.
The station has remained the same near the the railroad cut through the hillside. WF Tower likewise hasn't really changed. Along main street we have a new machinery and equipment supply vendor that receives flat cars, box cars and tankers at semi-regular intervals. Next to that is still St. Patrick's Church, a local landmark it survived the earthquake unscathed. The local general store is still next to the church, it's received a new coat of paint during the towns reconstruction, but otherwise is the same old store with a small Railway Express office on the side. Across the street from the store is sill the lumber yard. It was farther away from the fault line and really didn't take any damage, it's mostly unchanged except that they tore down one of their old sheds. Where the old lumber shed was is now a small warehouse that receives mainly boxcars of LCL goods that go out via truck to other local businesses that aren't rail attached. The row buildings along main street are pretty much all the same still, the corner bar, the hardware store, and the soda/candy shop are all unchanged. There does appear to be some construction planned for the far end of main street just before the railroad tracks.
Back out into the real 1:1 world I've finished a few buildings including a new warehouse card kit that I got from Scalescenes.com. If you have not read about them in the latest Model Railroader magazine or haven't been to the website do yourself a favor head over there and download their two free kits. I will say that I recommend using a glue stick over spray mount to mount the pages to card stock. My spray mounted pages began loosening from all the folding and stuff needed to build the kit. Also since the page weights are in metric I mistakenly used too heavy of card to build mine and ran into some issues, so for those interested I recommend that for light card just use standard ink jet printer paper (around 20 lb), for the medium card I think his recommendation is about 80lb card stock. I used a poster board which was a bit too heavy. For the heavy card though laminate two or three pieces of poster board together to get the right thickness. I will say that even with the issues I had my kit came out great, and hence I made room for it on my layout.
Shortly after I finished my card kit I went back to scalescenes and looked at their texture sheets. I picked up the US roadways kit. It's worth the $6 USD that I paid for it. The asphalt looks great once it's cut out and flanked with sidewalks or dirt, and the sidewalks came out really nice when I printed them. I'll attach a picture of my road and tree test from the other night to the end of this post. This was just a test so I used only one sheet and that's why the road markings are a bit off. my only real complaint about the roadway kit is that there isn't just a sheet with three n-scale sized two lane roads with a single white or yellow line down the middle. The addition of that to the kit would take this from a should have to a must have in my opinion.
Anyway, before I run on too long that is what has been happening on my layout. I will try and get some additional pictures of the new structures soon.
So it's been a few months since I wrote anything about my layout project at home. For good reason, my father was hospitalized for two months after the new year and then we started March with his funeral. Not a fun time.
One of my earliest memories of my dad is a shopping trip of all things. It's not too surprising that I would remember this as it was a rarity, my dad didn't like to shop unless it was at his own pace at a fleamarket. Anyway, this trip was to a home improvement store called Busy Beaver if I recall, although the details in my head are sketchy and it might have been a Hills or Gold Circle or something like that. The important thing is that it was the day my dad picked out a train around our family Christmas tree. I think I was about 3 or 4 years old at the time. I remember how excited he was about that train set. Just last year I had asked him about it, and he told me he was actually really excited as he had always wanted a train when he was a kid, but his family could never afford one. That train over the years apparently meant a lot to both of us.
Onward to 2009, and my youngest son Simon seems to have the train bug right now too. He spent a lot of time with me just watching my GG1 go around and around this year. So sometime in March I pulled out the West Forge model I've been working on and got some trains running on it. I pulled out some structures and rolling stock and had a great time with a table top module. The kids really enjoyed it too. Unfortunately I decided not to stick it way back in the closet where I had been keeping it I set it upright along the wall of my bedroom with full plans to pull it out in a few days and start figuring where I wanted to place my structures on it. In comes my son who manages to somehow fall off my bed and breaks his fall with my foam layout. The damage is probably fixable but it's cracked clean through 98% of the module. If it weren't for some ducktape and ballast I think it would have been sheared clean into two pieces.
So now I'm left decided do I try and repair this to make it functional (my goal was to be able to provide 20 to 30 minutes of operating fun on the module), or do I scrap it and start moving on and renovate my basement to give me a nice train room.
Obviously the latter option would be much more fun :-D
If you are in the Pittsburgh area and you enjoy a good train display and haven't gone yet this year make sure to stop by the Western Pennsylvania Model railroad Museum to see their show. Directions and times can be found on their website http://www.wpmrm.org/.
If you are familiar with the show at the Carnegie Science Center, this one is almost twice the size in a scale that is about 50% smaller, so you see nearly 4 times the trains, scenery and towns.
So if you haven't gone already try and make time before mid-January to stop down and see their display. They also have a large Lionel Toy train display as well as several Thomas the Tank Engine tables for the kids to play on. The WPMRM is a non-profit Museum dedicated to preserving the memory of Western PA's railroads. All the staff are volunteers and all the work is done by the volunteers too. Who knows you might see me down there volunteering too!
I love Christmas time. I know we are still in Advent and Christmas actually begins on the day most Americans seems to think it ends, unless you are like most of the Pittsburghers I know and leave your tree up until the Steelers are out for the season.
I can't say for certain what it is about Christmas that gives it that magical feel that would make even Walt Disney envious. It could be the presents, Santa Clause, freshly fallen snow, or just time spent casually and freely with friends and family. This is something even I have had a hard time with this year. Between a bad economy, a scary election season, failing companies all over and the increased stress that work has put on my team to provide more and more analysis of our business it's been tough for me to enjoy even a simple Christmas party let alone this wonderful Advent season as I should be.
It's hard to let the excitement and greed of secular and commercial Christmas not get to me. Where does an N scale train fit into all this. Well My wife and kids gave me my Christmas present early this year. It was a really nice HO Scale Locomotive done in the scheme of the Oil Creek and Titusville railroad here in Western PA. My first thought was that it would great pulling some passenger cars around the tree. That however is where things really started going wrong for me.
Search as I might I wasn't able to find my HO EZ-track, and the only store near by me that carries it discontinued all their train products this year and don't stock it any longer, and I just didn't have time to run down to the next town south of me to the hobby shop there last week. This was a real disappointment for me as I really wanted to have that train around the tree. The train around the tree is one of those things that while I can certainly live without one having one adds to the magic for me by linking this Christmas to those when I was a kid and my dad put up a 4x4 plywood sheet layout under the tree.
This year though I was really given a special gift by my daughter in something she said the other day. She prayed the other day that "everyone could be happy with what they have." This hit me hard personally because lately it's been tough for me. We have only one income unlike most of my friends and relatives, and so I have a lot less disposable income. Don't get me wrong I don't feel slighted by this in any way, in fact I'm very blessed and lucky to have all that I do. Sometimes though it's tough to not want more than I can justify having. This little statement helped me put things into perspective, for me one of the things that meant was improvising a little bit of track. While I didn't have HO track I had a bunch of N scale track that came with a small set I bought years ago. So I pulled it out along with its matching power pack, ripped up the tree skirt that was all bunched up and setup my trains.
Most of my equipment is N scale, and has been since the early 90s so after I did this it really started to make more sense. Granted its small, but hey it got my GG1 out of the box and running, and its quieter than my Lionel set that is just too loud in out living room.
This also had the benefit of getting me back into working on my rolling stock. I changed out a lot of old rapido couplers I had for Accumate or Micro trains ones. I also started weathering my cars a bit with pastels which has really made them look better I think. You can see the differences with the tank cars in the lower photo. All in all I think I'm a lot happier to just focus on what I have and enjoy rather than searching for something new to make me feel better. This doesn't mean I won't be buying more couplers since I still have stock to convert, but it does mean that I'll be buying N-scale ones and probably not messing around putting Kadee couplers on my under the tree train this year, or looking to buy a new cheap train set just to get the track from it (I seriously almost did it the other day).
So this got me thinking a lot lately that maybe I should consider something more for next year, nothing huge but maybe just a 40"x48" platform with some foam scenery and a tunnel on it. Something that I could screw the tree stand into to secure it and camouflage it. I guess I'll just have to make sure that if I do build it I make sure to be happy with what I have and not go over board for an basic under the tree layout.
The benefits of my four year olds philosophy are also helping in other areas of life. I'm happier at work, and in fact I'm making an effort to be sure that folks get exactly what they asked for or paid for and not cutting corners just to save me time. I also think that I'll start preparing all the "stuff" in my basement for a full purge onto ebay and out to the Saint Vincent de Paul store. I have a lot of stuff that I've accumulated over the years, most of it I save because it has "value", but in the end it's just cluttering up my house and life and making it harder to do what I want to be doing. If all goes well I'll clean up that stuff and have a nice place to setup my trains and a nice place to play with my kids.
That, is how I'm going to try and be happy with what I have this year, and to try to avoid that greedy feeling that can pop up when I start to see all the "toys" other folks seem to have. I hope you all can have a Merry Christmas enjoying what you have and not focusing on what you don't.
This turned out to be a fun project to let the kids help out with. I decided to use acrylic tube paints for coloring the ties. granted they will not hold up as well as something like Polly Scale or Model Masters would have, but I had them and they are easy enough to clean up that I wasn't too worried about the kids spilling anything. Plus I really didn't feel like dragging the air brush out for this. I choose a dark brownish red for the base color. I'm really not sure why I choose that color. It went on and dried very red looking rather than a dirty brow. Already the track is looking better than the glossy black color it comes.
Here is the layout after the red paint was dry. Again not sure why I went so red. It's pretty clear here that the color is too red. You can also see the cut hillside I added to the corner here has the scultpamold but on it now. This is a close up of the track after I decided to dry brush a grayish brown over top of the red. Things still look overly red here as the sides of the ties are red in a lot of places where the dry brushing didn't touch. Once the ballast is down it should cover up a lot of that. After this shot was taken I wound up replacing the bad section of track (seen as the top track in this shot) and things began to run much more smoothly.
Now I wish I could say that my track work was great, heck I'd even be happy to say it was good, but at best my track work is passable. That's one of the reasons I decided to start with such a small project. I had a bunch of code 80 flex track, cork and blue foam left over from previous projects and that meant that this project was going to be a cheap way to improve my skills in N Scale. To get started I began test fitting my track at the least forgiving areas my turnouts and crossover. This let me start to get a feel for where I also wanted to break out my power blocks since initially this layout will be all DC based. I used a blue sharpie this time to start noting where I needed to install insulators and what looked like good spots for my feeder wires. Once I was happy with a particular pieces location I used my dremel tool and a pair of tin snips to cut my flex track and then soldered it all together. I really have to admit that I might choose to not solder any special track next time like the cross over and turnouts as later when I had to clean up some poor track work I nearly ruined a turnout. Note that the solder removing ribbon from Radio Shack works wonders to help get a piece of track free. Here you can see the first half of the inner and outer loops completed. Looks good doesn't it? Well it wasn't I had to remove almost the entire inner loop seen here because I somehow managed to point the soldered joint on that section. Nothing would run properly over that spot. Next time I will really have to pay more attention to this part and not rush it so much. I think i was over confident in my own soldering abilities. I've been soldering for years and years, but soldering track is a lot different than electronics. This is what the track looked after it was all layed. Again on this half I did have to replace a second section of the inside loop due to a poor connection between two pieces of flex track. You can also see the blue markings noting where the insulators are installed at. This is a close up of the connection to the rest of the branch that isn't modeled. At some point if this small module works out well I'd like to make it a semi-permanent piece of a larger layout that shows the rest of the branch and possible an interchange with the Pennsy main line and maybe an interchange with another line (NYC, Bessemer or B&O probably). At this point I really haven't given much thought to what comes next. Also in this shot you can see the ground throws that I installed. I have never used these before but I decided to use them this time because I wasn't using switch motors and didn't want to be using those huge atlas switch machines. For a few dollars apiece they are well worth the investment to me. They have an internal spring that makes sure there is some tension on the points in both directions and they lock slightly at each end to help maintain the points connection to the rails. Plus they were super easy to install. As I mentioned above I tried to repair some of the bad connections before I replaced them. Here is my example of what not to do. I used a few larger nails to try and push the inside rail into a better position then I attempted to redo the solder, but that just didn't work. I wound up cutting this whole piece out and putting fresh flex track in. You can also see the newly installed feeder wires and spst power switch that I installed to turn this section of rail on and off from the power bus.
So yes life happens. It's been a while since my previous post about the building of my West Forge practice layout. With all that's been happening in the world I've spent a lot of time working providing my employer with detailed productivity reports to help the hospital staff appropriately and in a cost effective manner, but that's another post. This one is a continuation of what I was working on previously. My 2x3 N scale Pennsy themed layout.
In the above picture you can see what became my method of transferring my track plan. I used XTrkCad to print out a 1:1 scale version of my plan, I choose to trim off the excess paper edges and then taped each piece to the blue board in the proper position. I choose to save paper and not print the empty the middle section. Once that was complete I used a thumb tack to poke holes through the plan into the blue board down the center line of all the rails. You can see I also tested the fit of my turnouts to make sure the program had the correct template. Happily it did size all the parts correctly.
In this photo you see the next two steps I took. I used a black sharpie to darken each pin mark just to make it easier for me to see the lines (and it made the work visible for this photo). I then began to fit my cork roadbed into place by following the darkened center line. To hold down the road bed I used yellow wood glue and standard metal straight pins pushed into the shoulder of the roadbed. I made sure to keep the flat top of the roadbed cleared as much as possible so that I wouldn't run into any issues when I installed the track. This was then all left to dry for a few days.
Here you can see the edge of the finished module with the road bed in place. I've added a small cut hillside to the one corner to add some interest The foam layers are again glued together with yellow wood glue and straight pins. You can also see the edge of the foam where I used plain old duct tape to strengthen and protect the side of the foam. While certainly not a nice piece of fascia the duct tape really did help to the protect the sides from getting too banged up while I was working. This is something I will probably do again when working with any exposed foam.
The final step for the roadbed was to cover everything with a light tan latex paint. I used just a cheap flat latex that was a pale sand color. While it does look very pale in this picture, and on the module, I still think it was better to go lighter here and let the ground foam darken the scenery later on. After I did this I realized that I'll have to paint most of the layout again anyway because I'm going to put sculptamold (of whatever the name of the generic version I bought is) onto the board to add some visual interest and to make it look less like a flat board, but I also wanted to make sure that the yellow glue holding down the road bed was sealed before I ballasted. This may or may not have been a good idea on my part but I was thinking that the really wet water and glue combo might damage the roadbed or weaken the glue that I used on it. Thinking back I believe that yellow glue is supposed to not be washable by water after it cures/drys so this step was probably not needed, but it still felt good to not be looking at plain old blue foam any more.
So next is going to be track, wiring and ballasting I guess. I'll try and get the next post up before Christmas, but who knows I still have a bathroom to finish repairing between now and then also. As usual please feel free to comment and let me know if you think I could have done something better.
