Around Wattinger Bridge

This rather convoluted episode will cover a number of different storylines around the Wattinger bridge. The real scene is pictured below. Forgetting about the building which we'll get to later, note the arched bridge, cliffs, distinctive stepped tunnel portal, river and foliage (albeit seen in autumn/fall here).

For the cliffs, I am using an idea seen on a Youtube video from "Marklin of Sweden" who shares some nice model rail tutorials on his channel. I think he's in HO scale, but they are full of good ideas and he's well worth a look for quirkiness value.

In his waterfalls video (which contains a number of interesting tips), he suggests expanded polystyrene foam for rockfaces, so given this is a lightweight layout, that might be worth a try.

I found some of the white bubbly stuff and made a big mess on the floor by slicing vertical lines at various angles and thinning the back to be left with this.

 Which was glued to the cliff face and pinned in place:

 And painted gray. As you can see, this actually happenned before the ballast went in...

Some thinned black paint was washed on board and a little white drybrushed on the pointy edges later on.

But in the interim, I found a fairly side-on pic of the bridge (taken from the upwater side) and photoshopped it into this:

One of these bridge sides was cut out, glued onto thin card, and pinned in place in the below pic. Printed out, they are a little redder in shade than I'd like, but this might have been my doing in Photoshop. Next time I'd probably try to add a bit more depth/texture contrast in luminosity.

As can be seen, with the ballast in place, a tunnel portal was cut out of a sheet of Slaters roof tiles and added into place. Almost all layouts need to be condensed down from the real thing, and here is no exception - you may note that my bridge needs to be almost S shaped to kink the track back around before the edge of the layout.

 A bit of foliage to conceal things and its looking OK:

A few other items of note: 

• I haven't modelled the underside of the bridge arch (the real one is concrete with stone facing apoplied on the sides), but the area 'under' the bridge has been painted quite dark, and dark foliage used.
• The previously mentioned blue-green pines have had a splash of a more yellowy-green shade applied. 
• The previously mentioned brighter green trees which looked a bit like saguaro cactuses have all been beefed out by putting a second tree 'inside' the first one to give it more branches.
• Darker bushes and tones have been used down in the shadows by the bridge and tunnel.

I still need to wash some light shading onto the tunnel portal to give it more texture, finish off a little more scenicking around the portal and decide what to do about further track weathering.

Ballast and be damned

Some people hate ballasting, some people never do it, but I reckon it's one quick thing that begins to transform a toy train into a model.

In Z scale, the work seems no different to any other scale, and I wrote a more detailed post on ballasting here (on N scale track) a few years ago:
http://motoriseddandruff.blogspot.co.nz/2013/03/getting-stoned-ballasting-101.html

For Wassen's lower level, I was pretty finicky about getting the stones all laid out nicely before glueing, used isopropyl alcohol to pre-wet the ballast, and use plastic pipettes to apply this and the diluted PVA glue.

I used a JTT ballast that has a slight green/blue tinge to it - mainly because it was available from a local purveyor, and it was reasonably priced.

I've done a 'fair' job and have tidied up a few bits since these pictures.

Might have to weather the tracks when everything has dried, but in the meantime this feels like a milestone in terms of scenery on the lower level.

Catenary...

I don't intend to model catenary wires in Z but may might (under duress) make some etched brass wire-holders in time (although that will make track cleaning difficult).

I definitely want the masts as a minimum though, and will need them to be in place before the track is ballasted.

Using a method used previously, I soldered these up using some H-shaped brass attached to a small foot that can be glued to the layout and then scenicked over to hold them down.

Some Plastruct could be used for this but the brass has the benefit of being subtly bendable (if its vertical angle needs to be corrected) but stiff enough to resist accidental bumping which might break plastic ones.

As can be seen, these were welded up on a bit of firewood, and then painted with some light grey before being attached.

This is actually an "alternative fact" (phrase of the week), as most of them were foolishly not painted after being added to the layout...

Train Nerds at Wassen

I added the big farm shed above Wattinger last week, built in similar fashion to the previous one I made. It's obviously scaled down a lot from the real thing and I probably should have used the stripwood boards 'skinny side on' rather than using the flat sides to plank the walls which would have made the thing look a little more detailed and in scale.

A pair of goobers with cameras were also added in homage to the formerly famous Wattinger Curve photospot. The standing guy is carrying a big white Canon lens on a big DSLR around his neck (made from part of an N scale loco horn) and the guy sitting down has a tripod made from brass wire topped with a video camera.

The real shed is in the back left corner of the following picture taken from above the curved-tunnel mouth on my final visit here. The pic is similarly populated with railfans on the perch overlooking the famous curve.

BLS Re 485 Connecting Europe - 3

On the roof, an additional power thingy was added, and the Marklin 'hole' that holds a screw-switch to select catenary or track power was boxed over.

These additions were painted, the thing was given a shot of Dullcote lacquer and a little weathering added on top. In general, these things tend to stay pretty clean in service.

Windows were re-installed (what a pain), as were the pantographs (likewise). The real thing has 4 pantographs to deal with the multi-country voltages but we'll deal with that at some later stage. At one end I managed to put in some sunblinds under the front windows that are visible below.

It could do with some underfloor detailing, but for now, this will do.

BLS Re 485 Connecting Europe - 2

Crikey. To think that this morning I was staring at a stripped Hoyer shell....

This evening I managed to get my ALPS printer and attached XP desktop ("take a step back in time...") plugged together and working for the first time in four years. It's made two international trips since it was last used but printed out the 'connecting europe' decal reasonably well on the second go. Appropriately enough, I used the 'Raleway' typeface from 1001 Free Fonts website. The 'bls cargo' decals were done previously on a laser printer during the habbiins silver box wagons saga.

USB plug for scale...

Compared to the prototype, the white Raleway lettering is 'close enough' but not quite perfect. I made this worse myself and only figured out why after I'd applied them: its been such a long time since I used Microsoft Word that I misunderstood one of the 'font' formatting options and ended up making the letters wider rather than the taller I was trying for but didn't notice what I'd done at the time.  A few other placements and sizes are a little off too, but it's not too bad unless you happen to be looking at the comparison picture that I have foolishly provided below.. 

Incidentally, this is one of the few shots I took with one of these leading a train. I have a feeling these locos are really light grey rather than silver, but in sun vs clouds they look quite different, and when I used light grey the whole thing looked a little flat, so I'm glad I went with the silver.

The loco number '006' decal on the front that you can't really see on the model pic was borrowed from an N scale 'Santa Fe repaints' set from Microscale.

BLS Re 485 Connecting Europe - 1

I mentioned in one of my first posts here that an intermodal train powered by BLS Cargo locos might be nice.

BLS has its origins in the original Bern–Lötschberg–Simplon railway and also runs trains on the Gotthard route in conjunction with DB. They have a mix of locos including the Bombardier TRAXX leading the train above at Wattinger with a slightly newer Railpool-leased but BLS-advertorialised Re 486 unit. The BLS owned class Re 485 locos were painted in a striking 'Connecting Europe' livery when introduced a dozen or so years ago.

I've always liked this livery and thought it might make an interesting model, so picked up a Marklin Hoyer class 185 fairly cheaply on ebay a while back. These have the correct-shaped cabside windows and general appearance with the main difference being that the BLS loco is a multisystem job with 4 pantographs.

Pulled to bits (everything covered in Marklin oil inside):

Sprayed light gray.

Meh...

Sprayed silver:

That looks a bit more peppy even though the silver I have sprays a bit lumpy.

Partway through brushpainting some green on:

The square was masked with the Tamiya tape I used on the habbiins wagon a while back and brushed.

More to come...

Have a Cow, Man

There are quite a lot of cows in Switzerland, and a few of them inhabit the hills across from Wassen. It's surreal to hear their bells ringing - just like you'd expect from the movies or strange dreams.

I bought a pack of six Preiser 1:220 cows and installed one on the layout for a pic of my cow shed from a few days ago. They're typically black and white, like many cows are...  Alas, most Swiss cows that I've seen are not.

So I painted some over with a light brown sheen. With a white nose, white ears and a black dot for a nose like proper Swiss cows. Hard to see in these awful phone pics. Must find my proper macro lens.

Need some bells for them now.

Going Green

The banks of my river turned greener this week with plantings of some rather odd looking trees.

Starting with my bright green grass from recent postings, trees were planted.  The glueshell is quite strong and resilient, so a hole was poked with a pushpin and then enlarged with some pointy pliers:

Note from the above that I like to lay some darker 'stuff' on the base so that when you look through the trees and bushes you don't see bright green grass underneath. This is primarily Peco dark earth scatter material that looks like old leaves and rotting wood.

Trees are then planted. I had grand plans to order some more refined items, but in the meantime have come across a few JTT editions in stock locally. These pines are a little blue in colour for my liking.

With a dob of PVA on the trunk, they are installed and assisted into a vertical position if required - there's nothing worse than leaning trees...

I like to layer my scenery - the Woodland Scenics foliage mats that can be teased out are really useful for this, and on top or around tends to be placed lumps of coarse ground foam or their Fine Leaf Foliage.  There are also a few Silflor grass clumps added, even though Switzerland itself doesn't seem to have invented long wild grasses yet. The idea is to mix it up in colour, texture and heights so that from a distance it looks natural than it does up close. All of this scenic martial is from a large box of the stuff recovered from previous layouts. Some items have seen service on three or more layouts over the past 20 years.

 And thus:

The JTT trees are reasonably priced, but I'm not crazy about them (well, not in a good way). The pines are too bluey a shade of green and the light coloured things look like cartoon cactusses. But it's a good start and doesn't look too bad from a distance.

Don't have a Cow Shed

Farm sheds (for storing feed, implements and providing shelter for animals in Winter I guess) are fairly common in the Wassen area's hills, so in the spirit of randomness that drives my modeling.... one might liven up the near edge of the layout as my first Z scale building project.

There are many styles of these things, but I particularly like this one which lives up above the 'big bridge'.

It has a nice tiled roof and walls made up of wooden slabs that interlock in the corners. The set of doors look like an alteration and I'm not sure how you get up into them (maybe you have to stand on a cow).

A start was made with a few bits of foam board cut to a random size that looked about right to provide a base. On top was perched some Ratio N scale slate roofing, cut to size and glued at the peak with some plasticard rod to cap it off.

While the roof was set aside to dry, I cut six 'long' and six 'short' lengths of stripwood. These happened to be HO 2x4s that were lying around and seemed close enough.

These were stacked in alternating lengths on the side walls, before the ends were done in a corresponding manner:

The doors were vertical strips of the same wood with some overscale hingey looking arrangement glued on top:

That looks just on this side of hideous, but just enough to be plastered with paint that will hopefully hide some of the imperfections.

Paint in this case from my $2 tray of kiddie acrylics from The Warehouse. Yellow+a little red, lightened with white for the tiles, dark gray (white plus black) washes for the sides and a little on the roof

Groovy Julia. I post this, it appears I forgot to add the lengthwise beam ends under the roof, but close enough for a first effort. These Preiser 1:220 cows seem a bit on the large size, but I guess we'll call that forced perspective...