The Far Yonder Hills

Just a quick update to show you the completed hills, tunnel portal and blending of the highway; although after taking the picture I notices a couple of gaps I need to fill. Obviously applying paint and other scenic materials are yet to be done, that will come a bit later once the ballasting of this module is complete.

Right now I am installing the missing 2 switch motors, wiring up the last of the signals and thinking about where and what lighting to install; which I think will consist of a few yard lights and a couple of lights on the station platform. In between all of this procrastination I am now also applying track ballast...I will post some updated pictures once this is complete. As an aside, next to wiring, applying ballast is my least favorite part of model railroading! It is a long tedious and laborious job and will take me weeks to complete...ugh!

Rock Making 101

Here's a quick and dirty post on how to built rocks using a cheap and easy technique.

In the past, I made rocks from Woodlands scenics rock molds, and simply cast them using plaster of paris. However since I don't have the molds anymore, I balked at spending $20 per mold and after doing a bit of research decided that a bit of trial an error was called for.

You will need the following.

1. Some rocks! Don't use smooth pebbles, you want something with some obvious definition. Tree bark could also work for this.
2. Plain old aluminium foil.
3. Plaster for the casting, I use whatever I have handy.

So as you can see, the only outlay is for the plaster and the foil, which is free if you pinch it from the kitchen when no one is looking.

Firstly, grab your rock and wrap it nice and tight in the foil, you want to try and smooth the foil out as much as possible and as tightly as possible.

Once that's done, it's a matter of releasing the rock from the foil as gently as possible, this can take a bit of wrangling and messing about and it will lose some shape, but you can easily squish the foil back when done.

Lay your molds on a flat surface, depending on the rock they may not sit straight, so you might need to support the molds with something; using the rocks just released from your molds should do the the trick, although I didn't find I had to.

Mix up your plaster so it's fairly runny and pours easily and gently fill the molds. If you've done it right, they will self level.

Let them sit for a few hours and then peel off the foil.

As you can see, they look pretty rockish, and once painted will be as good as what you would get from the Woodlands Scenics molds. I had no problems with the foil sticking and in fact was able to reuse it multiple times.

The real advantage of this method is that the variety of rocks you can create is limited to only how many rocks you can collect!

Highway Overpass

One of the problems I knew I would have to deal with building a long skinny shelf layout was how to handle the termination of the layout. The mainline at Silver Springs just ends, and I wanted this to be disguised.

After a lot of tooing and froing I had decided to disguise it with a highway overpass, specifically the one sold by Rix. However this kit set has a couple of limitations.

1.The price and since I would need 2 to make a double lane highway and a 3rd to increase the length, I was looking at well in excess of US$100 for a few pieces of styrene.
2.It is straight and I really needed my overpass to curve across the section of track that one day will extend to a staging yard.

So with these limitations in my mind I decided that I would attempt my first scratch built structure.

While I don't have an exhaustive list of supplies, I can tell you that basically my overpass consists of about 90% Evergreen styrene of various types with the remaining being the highway railings from Rix which they supply separately. The street lights came from somewhere in China and cost me the ridiculously low price of $4 and were freight free to boot. A quick and dirty calculation tells me that all up I spend about US$50, so a significant savings to create something that I think looks better than the packaged one.

All up the project took about 4 weeks to complete and I am very happy with how it turned out! If you want any further details feel free to post a comment.

I have to say this; if scratch building is something that scares you (like it did me) find something simple to build and have a go. Yes you will make mistakes, but the feeling of satisfaction when you have finished is far greater than building something from a kit.

If you notice closely the picture gives a bit of a clue as to the geographic location of my layout location. It's not for any particular reason that I chose this area other than I once (briefly) lived not far from it. I am not, repeat not, trying to replicate this part of the world.

The next part of this project is to add the hills around the fake tunnel portal so it all blends together nicely...oh, and add some vehicles!