The Mighty Reuss River

With some grass planted on that hill, I ended up doing a little creek-building this afternoon.

Mixing up some PVA white glue plus black and white paint to make a gray blend, the creekbed was painted and some Woodland Scenics Talus applied.

This is an old favourite for riverbeds. I think its made out of some sort of pumice  (so it's fairly light in weight) that has been tumbled to take off the sharp edges. I have some 'large', and 'medium-fine' stuff, so made some 'superfine' by crumbling up larger bits with pliers.

This, and some different shades of 'grass' down by the creek, was all glued down with diluted PVA. As an aside, using a plastic pipette is my greatest step forward in scenicking - it allows you to maintain so much control over where the mess is going. My second greatest advance is in wetting the scene lightly with isopropyl alcohol first - applied from another clean pipette.

With the creek in place (but not dry yet), and hastily staged passenger train, just imagine a few trees and the scene might start to look ok.

Up the creek towards Wattinger

Wattinger Curve classic

More Hill Skeletons

Some quiet progress has seen the skeletons of a few more hills form themselves on the front of the layout. In the below pic, the Upper Wattinger bridge (and the only tight curve visible on the layout) is in the foreground, with the classic Wattinger scene behind.

Here is the short bridge between the tunnel-under-Wassen-church and the Muhle (mill) tunnel. The real bridge is far taller and curves the opposite way, but hey, it fills in a corner. The Church (its spot visible just left of centre) should be taller (but any taller and it would be too tall for the middle level of track), I'm in-indecision about whether to put a roadway above the left portal of the Church tunnel. It would hide the tunnel portal, but might make the church seem even lower than it should be. My tracks also diverge off the bridge going into the yard, so in summary, I'm going to give myself zero stars for this scene in advance of the finished abomination.

The grass is always greener

As scenery starts to flow, the engineer in me tends to stand aside and make way for the bearded, smelly artist who will season the layout to taste.

Speaking of seasons, while I loved Wassen in the winter, building a convincing snow scene isn't something I would consider for my first foray into Z. So... something with blue skies, green grass and leaves on the trees it will be.

After venturing to the local hobby shop - which maintains a tiny, but useful selection of scenery items - I elected to buy the items they had in stock and start planting grass.

The 2-3 layers of glueshell (PVA white glue and old phonebook pages) seems to be strong enough and has actually stiffened up the layout overall torsion-wise even though its only 2/3rd completed.

So I brushed on diluted PVA and sprinkled on some Peco Meadow Grass with a touch of their Spring Grass which is a little lighter in colour as a base layer. It's a little odd using this fairly dated 'dyed sawdust' type of scenic material that we once used decades ago before Woodland Scenics (etc) got more creative. Isopropyl Alcohol was dribbled on to settle the stuff on steep slopes before more diluted PVA was dripped on with a plastic pipette.

Golly, it's very green. As if someone less conservatively dressed than I left their crushed velvet blazer on the layout. But then Switzerland is a pretty green place too.

The passenger approaches Wattinger curve; an intermodal heads up the middle level above the town and will cross the Middle Meienreuss bridge shortly; and a couple of covered wagons near the Command Post on the upper level.

Wattinger

Middle Meienreuss bridge (minimalist edition)

Flat out - another container wagon.

I mentioned last time that I have a few 'Res' stake wagons that lost stanchions in the post. It turns out that the tops pop off these quite easily, so it might be possible to turn one into a container flat.

There are many, many types of these as mentioned earlier, but I'm going to make one of the deep-sided ones similar, but not exactly the same, as this one:

Unfortunately, the Marklin chassis is a tiny bit wide, so when I add a thin plastic overlay the sides will stick out a little further than they should, but such is life. Hopefully it won't be too obvious. The sides were cut from some thin Plastruct strip that happened to be the same height as was required. I drew the angled lines on the plan to help me position my ruler and get the angles right.

They were duly stuck on. A set of containers was prepared: The K Line one was made into a 20 footer...

 A few ribs, bottom sill and tiedown hooks (from the Res shell) later:

And some detail and paint later:

It might look a bit crummy up close, but hopefully it will look ok in the middle of a train.  Its saved a bit by the nice Yang Ming container on top, which I think was from an American AZL doublestack model. The twistlocks' here are painted on blobs of yellow and weathering is primarily a washing of thinned paint dusted in places by that Tamiya weathering chalk. I tried to make some 'rusty pools of water' on the top of the gray container, but I'm not sure I got away with it...

While I was in the dungeon today, I went back and added a few more steel wire coils to the Res wagon with black thread, dusted some very thin gray paint  to take the edge off them, and weathered them all with a little rust.

The first container wagon (in the background) has been upgraded with a black 'data board' stolen off the Res wagon top, a re-blued container, and some weathering.

I need to add a handbrake wheel to the blue one, but other than that, it was a pretty quick build.

Rollin' on Dubz... RES wagon with wire wheels

I've acquired four of these 'Res' wagons (apparently the 'R' stands for 'flat wagon' in European) which came along in a freight set. I quite like them, but four is probably too many. I have some ideas for the two badly-packed ones that received a few broken stanchions in the post, but in the meantime...

The models are lettered for the German DB railway. Swiss SBB have them in their generic light gray colour too. While browsing the web for loads to put in them, I was taken by the example below carrying coils of steel wire. I've borrowed this image from www.photos-ferroviares.fr, so I hope they don't mind. If so, I'll remove it.

A quick splash with some paint washes followed, using the two Tamiya acrylic colours I own (rail brown and light gray).

 That's looking a mile better.

Next, I raided the house sewing facilities for some appropriate coloured thread.

And wound 30-40cm long strings around a tube of brass (that was probably a tad big) with a dab of PVA glue for adhesion.

Best not to wind too tight, as it's hard enough forcing the bales of steel off the end of the brass tube with your fingernails as it is.

Glued down, they look pretty good. I'm a few rounds short... but have run out of thread. Might have to make some black ones and add a touch of paint.

Not bad for less than an hour's work.

Continuing Mountainification

The hills continued to grow today. The PVA+whitepages glueshell takes about 2 days to set and with a couple of layers is pretty strong. For today's coverage, I used a less-watered down PVA mix.

A few details have been added into the landscape:

• In the above pic, bottom-left is the underpass and road to the Wattinger curve photospot
• in the middle of the pic, the Sustenpass road S-curves under the viaduct and the small road underpass to the farms behind branches off to its left
• up to the left of the pic you might be able to make out the zig-zag farm trail up to the Command Post, which is the little knob on the top level where there is a green stripe in the paper.
• in the Meinreuss gorge to the right, you can see the two rail bridges and the Sustenpass road bridge between its two tunnels.

Growing Hills

After track painting, ballasting is another thing that logically should be done before tunnels encroach, but I reckon this is pretty chicken and eggy. You need embankments to stick ballast to, and if hills don't go in first you end up covering your nice ballast in glue and plaster. I'll probably grow as much scenery as I can, ballast, and then close off the tunnels.

My preferred method for building scenic forms involves chicken wire (so you can mold the hillsides till they look right) and Woodland Scenics plaster cloth (because it's fast, sets into a hard shell, and is relatively mess-less.

On the other side of the coin, that method is also relatively heavy (remember that the layout is a featherweight so far) and relatively expensive. The plaster sometimes cracks and will often shed dust over time.

So this time I'm going to try a lattice of thin card to build the forms (and boy does it look pretty appalling in these pictures) stuck together by the cheapest, stringiest, nastiest hot glue gun that you can buy for $5 at The Warehouse:

This worked reasonably well - although it looks pretty flimsy, the hardshell on top should add strength.

With the hot glue gun and some strips cut from cardboard collected from the recycling over the past month, this is pretty fast to build and tweak. You may also note some black foamboard forms in place for the road and some of the buildings of Wassen.

Now to coat the skeleton with some lightweight skin. The first experiment was with pages from an old phonebook (again, borrowed from the recycling).  In the blue plastic tub, I mixed approx 50:50 PVA and warm water with a few drops of dishwashing liquid and stirred it all up. The ripped up bits of phonebook paper were dunked and applied a few layers deep.

We'll find out tomorrow just how stiff this is...

Beginning some scenery

View from the front for once...

It's been a long slog slaving over a hot soldering iron of late, but now that the mechanics are in reasonable shape it feels like time to start growing some scenery...

All layouts are exercises in compromise, and this one especially so as it tries to fit several kilometres of climbing and winding track into the size of a door.  Mechanically it all fits and it runs, but in terms of the layouts overall effectiveness, the rubber hits the road when the scenery goes in.

For here we find out if the various features 'fit and work' as we'd hoped.

The first thing I need to do is to add some bases for things like rivers and roads that are had to add level and flat after the hills start growing.

Here we see a simple flat white card base for the Reuss river as it passes under the 'upper' and 'lower' (where that wagon is) Wattinger bridges. The famous Wattinger curve lies just beyond, and in the distancee, the tracks go under a plinth-like table structure which is where the landmark Wassen Church will sit:

At this stage, I decided to paint the rails brown as it's easier to do this before they get enveloped in tunnels and cuttings:

A piece of unpainted track in the background for comparison...

I used some Tamiya acrylic brown that was lying around and a fine brush. In past lives, I've sprayed automotive primer from a can, and although this is fast, it tends to be quite red in colour ...and gets everywhere...

Latest Habbiinsings

I mentioned in an earlier episode on these Habbiins wagons that a silly Transwaggon decal might be added to the side of one at some stage. 

I've owned an ALPS decal printer for about 20 years that I have a love-hate relationship with.  It's expensive to run, temperamental (making it even more expensive to run) and only runs on Windows XP. I do have an XP computer lying around but don't really feel like finding it, unpacking it, plugging it in and seeing if it still talks to the ALPS at the moment. 

And while the ALPS is great for lettering and printing out the simple 'vector' images that I've drawn up using CorelDraw, Adobe Illustrator, and similar programs, it really struggles with 'raster' bitmapped images from the likes of Photoshop, or images that you might borrow from the interweb. Mainly because its ancient drivers struggle to mix colours and produce an output that isn't all dotty and lo-res like a video game from the 1980s.

The solution is to use a laser printer for these raster images because they'll readily print at 300 or 600 dpi - plenty of resolution for a model. I don't happen to own one, but my local library and local print shop do. While I did find a colour .svg vector image for this logo online, spending 20 cents on a copy is better than an afternoon swearing at the ALPS, so off I went armed with my images in a word processing document, a sheet of plain clear decal paper (purchased from MicroMark in the US about 5 years ago) and a ruler. 

After a bit of iterative fiddling to get sizes correct, PDF-ing, transporting via a USB stick and so on, out it came. And on it went. I measured 23mm, and it printed out at 23mm, but it should be a tad bigger. I suppose I didn't take the ribs into account. And it should be a bit lower down the wagon side. But hey, close enough and proof that ye olde decal paper hasn't crumbled into dust.

Getting the runaround

There's not much to see in the below video clip that you haven't seen before, although for once: proof that a complete loop of the layout by fully traversing the uphill and downhill mains is possible.

There is one short 30cm section of the 'inner' uphill siding that still requires track, but all sections are wired up except for the strange siding at the back of the yard that you must back into. It's all provided for on the control panel, but needs 10 minutes and some wire to hook up.