Ballasting Completed

Time for a quick update.

This job, that of ballasting, has taken several months; done in between a bit of this and a bit of that.

As you can see, I went with a blended grey courtesy of Woodland Scenics. I researched this for quite awhile and in the end just went with what I liked the look of, rather than anything prototypical.

While I was doing this I also installed some street lights, ones which look much better than what I have on the overpass; so one of my next jobs is to replace them! Ugh...

Currently I am onto the next bit of track-work, which is painting the rails, something which I decided to do after taking some close up videos of moving trains.

The shiny silver look of the tracks looked completely unrealistic when viewed from that angle. You can see some of the track I have painted on the left and I think you will agree, it looks way better. So over the next couple of weeks I will do the rest.


All going to plan, my next post will include be a video of a loco actually moving.

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!