Wassen Gotthardstrasse

 I intended to make the Wassen Shell service station today.

After making a start on the yellow canopy, some time was spent pondering about how big the building should be, and where it should all be located on the layout. 

To do that it made sense to see where the road goes.

To do that I might as well put down the road. 

To do that I needed to put the sidewalk and buildings down. 

So the (incorrect for Wassen) cobblestone sidewalks went in, almost all the buildings on the far side of the road (except the Alte Poste) were glued down, a little scenery was added behind the gaps, and the road went down. A drill bit is holding down the schoolhouse in a near-vertical position.

The main bits of road on this layout were made from Faller Z Scale crepe roading. But that ran out, and it's hard to get Z scale roads here. Here, I used some larger scale stuff, trimmed the width of the side lines and drew in middle lines with a white pencil. This was then extended up towards the right side of the layout, tapering a little at the far end under the church, as that will be hidden by buildings and trees.

The Shell station canopy is the triangley bit. With the roads and basics in place, I can start adding soem more buildings. Starting with the Shell, and probably the obvious pink building in between it and the existing buildings.

As an aside, I see the Alte Poste hotel shut down in 2019 and was for sale. It seems silly, but I expect that a lot of their trade was railfans, so they can probably blame the BasisTunnel for there now being too many rooms in Wassen.

Road to nowhere

That black, unfinished foamboard road (my amalgam of the local road through Wassen and the A4 motorway) has lain dark, ugly and unfinished for too long..

First, some footpath/gutters.... Some stripwood will do, painted with grey:

And one side pinned down into place using contact glue:

And some plasticard sides (below):

Then I applied a roll of Noch 44100 Z scale roading. This was bought on a whim on a recent visit to a foreign hobby shop and it's quite a neat product. Crepey in nature, its flexible enough to be stretched around slight curves. It's also self adhesive.

For sharper corners, you can cut the thing in half and make tighter curves:

 Then another stick of stripwood for the other side:

  I've also started to add a bit more foliage around the place in the Wattinger tunnel area:

OK, so I've almost run out of this stuff (the roll is only a metre long) and the road is only just reaching town, but overall I'm happy with it so far. I probably should have taken some width off it as it headed into town to give a little forced perspective.