From zero .... to trees

So in an  effort to save cash I decided to have a crack at making my own trees.

Really simple. All you will need is some rope, thin gauge wire, brown spray paint, ground foam, hairspray and an electric drill.

1. Bang a nail into a fairly stable piece of timber;
2. Nip the head off of the nail. (be careful here else you will pierce your hand if you forgot you did it)
3. Cut off a length of wire and fold it around the nail once, so it is effectively folded in half, separate the two pieces of wire.
4. Pull your rope apart and snip off bunches of strands with a pair of scissors. You don't need to undo these bunches too much; lay them between the two lengths of wires wrapped around the nail.
5. Shove the ends of the wire in the drill and press the trigger gently. The wire should spin around, taking the rope with it and get tighter and tighter. When it's tight enough that the rope is all splayed out in individual fibers you can undo the chuck and slide the wire off of the nail.
6. Take your scissors and trim your tree into as natural a tree like shape as possible.
7. Spray all your trees evenly with a fine coat of brown spray paint.
8. Once the paint is dried, spray your trees with hairspray and sprinkle ground foam over them and voila! a tree is born.

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!

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!

Wiring Module One - Turnout Control

My initial intention was to not wire my turnouts at all and to use manual throws, since the width of the modules meant the turnouts were all within easy reach. That changed once I saw my first N Scale manual throw; way, way out of scale! One of the reasons I chose to use Code 55 was because of the more realistic profile and the turnout throws were just going to ruin the effect!

Tortoise slow motion switch control motors were my first choice, but the price bothered me. To purchase a single motor in NZ was going to set me back close to $40. Way, way too expensive for my taste. So after researching for awhile, I found an alternative motor made by an Australian company called DCC Concepts (their link is in the resources pages on this blog.). Their Cobalt Blue motors come in a few different flavors, including ones with DCC Decoders already built into them. I came close to going this route, but after mulling it over, realized changing turnout direction using my handheld throttle would just be a pain in the backside.

I eventually settled on a cheaper version, which has a cost of about $24, and meets all of my needs. DCC Concepts also supply all of the parts necessary to make a control panel, and so I bought a bunch of switches and LEDs, and then popped into a local engineering company and had them cut me some sheet metal plates for mounting everything too.

Installing the motors under the bench was relatively simple to do, and with the neat spring clips, there is no soldering required either; just pop the appropriate wire into the clearly labelled hole. I have 5 wires going to each switch motor. Power from the control panel, dcc bus power and the wire from the turnout frog (the green wire in the picture).

By far and away the most difficult, fiddly and time consuming part was wiring up the panel. I bought LEDs and switches from DCC Concepts also; the switches are great, each DPDT switch has a circuit board attached making power and led connection simple. The LEDs, well let's just say I dumped the lot and bought some cheaper dual color LEDs from my local electronic shop. The main issue with them is that they are far too bright for a control panel. I want them to be an indicator, not an INDICATOR!!!!! I also found them way too easy to blow; whereas the cheaper, not as bright alternatives seem a lot more stable. I'll put that last issue down to my electrical ineptitude that I have mentioned before.

The panel come up really well (other than the scratches which I have to repaint), it is easy to understand and functions exactly as is required.

The last step of this project is really just the detailing of the turnouts. I am going to use non functioning switch stands, but I will be doing that way off in the future...other projects call first!

Layout Update

So back to my haphazard posting!

Several months have passed and while I haven't made massive progress, I have made some. The first structures are now placed, the first one is my depot, passenger and freight, followed by a large industrial building which I have heavily modified to be a low profile background building.

All of these buildings have their lighting installed as you see below. I am really pleased with how they look, obviously there is no detailing done yet, but that sort of thing is the stuff that I like to do bit by bit.

You  might have noticed the signal light in the bottom picture! It's a model power signal which I picked up off of ebay (not sure if they are still in production), there are actually 3 on the layout now. I have them wired through the switch motors and they indicate whether the main line is cleared. I thought about wiring up block detection, then did the maths and thought about it again; way to expensive and way to complicated. This looks ok, and adds a bit more interest to the scene.

Also completed is my first road, which will eventually lead to a fuel loading depot. I'll get into that a bit more in my next post, along with my method for creating roads. I am currently working on creating a highway overpass which will span the entire width of the layout. I was going to purchase the Rix overpass, but after looking at the price and what I would get for my money (approx $100) I decided I didn't like to get royally ripped off, so I am scratch building my own. It's an evening project and I don't have much to show yet, so will hold off on posting any pictures until I have the supports all finished at least.