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.

Obere Wattinger Fin

Two outstanding items in the transformed Upper Wattinger corner were some piers/supports for the road bridge, and the little house/track maintainers house/signal house/I'm not sure what these are, but they are littered around the trackage at Wassen.

This hut was made out of some thick white cardboard that was lying around.

A bit of artistic license was employed to have it fit the space available. 

This end (that everyone sees in pictures of the real thing taken from the road) should have a different roof profile and be wider, but had to be condensed to fit the space.

I had a pic of it on my computer and thought it had yellow window shutters and red/orange window sills, so this is what I did, but those bright colours stood out and drew too much attention. 

I pondered this overnight and found another picture with light green shutters and grey sills, so today I recoated these items and it looks a bit more subtle. I don't want any of the horrible bits of the layout (all of it really) to stand out and kick you between the teeth, I'd rather have the trains be the eye-catching elements.

I also painted the 'wooden top floor' parts of the house as it appears in photos. This makes the place look a bit more interesting and less stark white.

As for the bridge piers, I was looking for something with a rectangular cross section to make two columns out of, but unfortunately we don't have a lot of hobby supplies in our town. Then I thought why not use drinking straws. These might have buckled and gotten out of alignment, but even before that fear had entered my tiny mind, I was passing through a local dollar shop when these wooden dowels jumped out at me. Perfect. 

I cut three sections to fit under the road bridge and used two of the (longer) offcuts as spacers between the columns to keep everything separated and parallel while the whole pier was assembled. The three short pieces were glued to a thin strip of card...

And then the card was folded around to form a 'capping' piece. The attaching was done with PVA wood glue, making sure not to get any glue on the spacers. As seen here under a glass of water that was being used to hold the card down while the glue sets: 

The spacers were then pulled out and discarded, and the 'structure' painted with a mix of greys that looked concretey. The piers were glued in and some rocks placed around the base:

The house hasn't been glued down and scenicked yet. 

Finishing up Upper Wattinger

I didn't take many decent pictures of the work done here, but Upper Wattinger is now largely done. 

From where we left off, the last of my various remaining pine trees were planted, along with some new fluorescent green trees that still need to be dulled down, and various other bits of scenic fluff were added.

My approach with scenery has always been to 'vary and layer.' Various means using many types of trees, foliage and colour from different manufacturers. And layering meaning that there is a base layer, which on Wassen is usually a dark green paint layer with some scenic 'grass' or other  ground cover applied. On top of this is often placed a layer of that scenic 'netting/web' that has bits of fluff attached. Made by Woodland Scenics or Noch, when teased out, it provides a nice 3d effect. On top of that go trees and bushes (foam clump foliage from Woodland Scenics and Fine Leaf Foliage also from Wodland Scenics, plus any old stuff I have lying around). 

In the really hilly bits here I've tended to put the base layer in, plant trees, then fill up the visible gaps with scenic fluffnet or clump foliage, and then detail with the odd filigree tree or grass detail (Silflor and other makers). Again always trying to mix up colours and textures so it doesn't just look like you've dumped a single bag of model scenery on your hills. 

I keep a box of scenic bits when I destroy a layout, so I use these recycled bits to fill up gaps and provide variety. I even have some old rubberised foliage that must be 30 years old. It looks terrible (it was probably the shizznit back then) but is fine when used sparingly under trees and filling in distant holes.

In another first for me, I tried weathering the ballast. To support a local hobby shop, I picked up a "Rail Weathering" box of Lifecolor paints (Italian?).  Using  a thinned mix of 'Sleeper Grime' and 'Brake Dust' brushed around the tracks, with some 'roof dirt' to simulate shadows in the tunnels. I reckon this looks pretty decent for a first effort so will have to do it on the rest of the layout. The Gotthard is a steep double tracked line, so I intended to make the downhill track more 'yellow/ brake brake dust' for brakes and the other darker for hard working grime and sand, but in the end thought it better to have them almost matching. It certainly helps tie the lighter Rohukan ballast colour into my Peco ballast, which has a slight blue tinge. The two pics below were taken while the mix was still wet, so it looks more subtle when it dries.

As a final touch, the river was added, overhead poles were added and painted, and a few other bits of grass added along the riverbank. There are a few tiny patches in the forest that need to be attended to, and that road bridge needs some concrete piers, but this looks pretty decent. Certainly better than it did. 

As a reminder, this corner is the only visible part of the layout made from tight fixed radius curves, which were necessary to get the geometry to work! The click track is easier to get smooth tight curves in than flextrack - especially at the joins!

The 2-Yearly Update!

Over the past two years I've regularly 'seen' my Z scale Wassen layout but haven't done much to it. There are a few projects on the go, but there hasn't been all lot of progress for a very long time. Recently I have been tinkering with NZ trains again, but ...

Inexplicably, I decided to do something on Wassen today.

Other than some repairs needed to rewind several years of being stored vertically in a basement that isn't always dry, three obvious things need to be done. These are adding more buildings to the town, and doing something with.the two front corners, which have remained oddly unscenicked. 

I decided to start with the corner closest to the door of the room the layout is hiding in.  This is the 'upper' Wattinger bridge over the Reuss river, but in its current unfinished state, it is not a great first impression of the layout.

Above: some white plastic padding attached to the bridge before adding the sides. All of the 'visible'  track on the layout is flex track except for this corner (and of course the hidden spirals)

Some basic grass has been added in places under the bridge, and the its stone 'sides' are being added. These are the same photoshopped pictures printed out for the lower Wattinger bridge about seven years ago! Ballast is about to be glued down between the Rokuhan plastic track roadbeds.

Next it was time for tunnel portals. I'm almost out of the old dark grey Ratio roof slate sheets that were used for the other stone portals, but as this is a relatively self-contained little scene, I decided to use some cardboard cobblestone street sheets that I bought for my
N scale Brusio viaduct (another barely started project!)

And compared to the real location in the superb VGB Gotthard book:

Some trees, foliage and Woodland Scenics tallus rocks in the river will have the corner looking better than it did yesterday. 

I noted in the previous post (two years ago) about the upcoming Marklin Re 6/6. Two years later there is still no sign of these!

Scenicking through the Lockdown

With most of the world (including here) on Coronavirus lockdown, one might as well visit the train room to fill in an hour or two here and there.

Over the past few days I've made up some brass catenary masts for the middle level (finally!).

There are a few missing out of shot to the right but things are coming together and the layout is beginning to look more complete now. I placed my 1:300th PostBus on the road bridge for these pictures - it looked good in a forced-perspective-kinda-way until the upper level train was placed behind it!  

Interestingly, on the real Middle Meinreuss bridge, there have been two layouts of the masts in recent times. The bridge used to have two sets of masts spaced out on the main span, but since the bridge has had concrete walkways added, it has had one set in the centre. I didn't include the concrete walkways as they don't look quite as nice as the old style to my eye. 

Here is one of my prototype pics from August 2016 with the sticky-out concrete walkways (as not modeled!) and the posts in the centre of the span (as modeled!)

A tunnel portal has been installed at the left side of the middle level - my cliff face is necessarily steeper than the hill that the similarly shaped portal burrows into on the real planet Earth because it conceals the top level balloon loop.

And some trees have grown around and above it on the 'South Hill' tidying up this end of the layout a lot.

My tree supplies are running low though, so I need to pace myself...

Forest Planting on the Hills of Wassen

The hills are alive, with the sound of... trees.  For something different, I decided to plant a shipment of trees that I received recently.

The good news: they look good.

The bad news: I thought the additional 200 trees would be enough to do both hills, but after planting 150 on the North/Erstfeld/right end of the layout today (on top of the hundred I already have growing in the Meienreuss gorge) it looks like I could easily use an additional hundred or more for the South/Goschenen/left end hill.  

The winner so far for forest volume: Heki HK0309 1½"-3" ECONOMY UNFLOCKED PINE MINI-FOREST/100 PKG

At around $25USD for 100 trees (cheaper if you wait for a sale), that's a reasonable deal even with shipping to these far flung isles. En-masse, they look quite effective, with the more detailed guys in the foreground.

Other items in use from the recent order which are decent:

• Heki HK1432 2"- 4¾" UNFLOCKED PINE SET/50 Trees - same style of tree as the bulk pack, but some taller ones, and less-good value than the 100 pack... and in Z who needs the additional height anyway... so I took an inch off the bottom of many of the tallest ones and used the offcuts as filler in the forest.
• Heki HK0306 2"-3½" SMALL PINE MINI-FOREST/30 PKG - a lighter colour, flocked so reasonably nice, but a bit obviously "spiral-wound" when viewed up close. They look ok.
• Busch BH6469  1½"-3½" FIR TREE SET/25 TREES - nice looking small/dark/well-detailed fellows
• And I'm almost out of my previous JTT and Noch trees too, but have enough of the 'good' trees left that I'll probably only need to order one more of the 100-pack economy unflocked jobbies to add bulk to the South hill.

Less impressive:

HK0301 1½"- 3" PINES & DECIDUOUS FOREST/ 40 TREES Heki 'Ready-Made Mini-Forest!'  There are some weird, oddly coloured  and blobby looking folks in here. Not vert 'to-scale and not recommended for Z scale. I'll use what I can and hide the rest or put them in my scenery box.

'Upper Wassen' pottering

• The houses were scenicked-in today and various weeds, bushes and small trees added around them and the surrounding hillside.

• The big bridge was weathered a little with some gray drybrushing and washing which don't show up in these pictures (indeed I may have taken them before I did this step) 

• A little barn was added to the hills of  'Upper Wassen' that was a common prop in the railfanning days (the real barn below)

Unfortunately I'll never be able to exactly replicate this shot because my model of the bridge has no rear side!

And the 'model' scene from the other side on the layout :

All in all, the snooty suburb of Upper Wassen is looking pretty decent.

It might almost be time to start popping in some catenary poles on the middle level.

Back in Z Saddle

Back home and looking at the layout today, and I managed to complete some small and relatively insignificant things:

• Some undergrowth was planted under and around the trees on the southern side of the upper Meinreuss gorge. This is all from my box of 'green stuff' salvaged from many previous layouts over the years, and as this is deep in the trees towards the back of the layout, I tended to use darker/scungier stuff like that old rubberised lichen from what seems like a hundred years ago. 

• The base scenic layer was added to the lower Meinreuss cliff face behind the church. I'm using some quite coarse grey/brown Faller scatter material for this, which, for a while after I'd purchased it, I wondered what on earth I'd use it for, but it's become a favourite for this sort of base layer because it produces such a well-textured and colour-varied yet appropriate finish.

And a more notable item is the house beside the track on the upper level at the far end when viewed from the Command Post. As seen here in an amalgam of prototype pictures (both mine and found online).

I whacked this together rather randomly in a forced-perspective compression kinda frenzy out of some white plasticard and some 'brick' embossed brown stuff for the roof. The first cut looked too big when placed on the layout, so I cut down the width and some height off the bottom until it looked about right. I'd like it smaller of course, but too small and it might look a bit silly when trains pass.

It's not glued down yet, so it might be cut down to size further tomorrow... The windows were done in the same way as the church (plasticard strip blackened with a marker pen and with panes scratched into it placed behind). Shutters and other detail are just painted plastic strips.

The structure was painted a light grey to take some of the starkness (and 'noticeability') out of a pure white structure with an orangey 'tile' roof that will be toned down when the paint sets.

The compressed depth is quite visible from this angle, which also shows some of the scenicking in and around those trees on the near bank of the gorge.

Lost in a Forest

The Meinreuss gorge and the hills around it have a few trees on them in the real world. More than a few actually, so now that I have some base scatter undergrowth in place on my Z scale Wassen, it's time to do some arborealing.  What a great word I've just made up

I'm using a mix of trees here, based on what I have come across in shops and auctions.

• The leftover JTT bluey-coloured pines from a local hobby shop
• A fancy box of 40 Noch pines of a yellower tinge covered in superfine foliage
• A box of 100 el-cheapo Heki unflocked pines

At least I think they are pines. I know they aren't cacti...

That's a start being made. My general process is to use an old round dental pick to gently poke an appropriately-sized hole into the scenery - some of which is firm, but some is merely PVA-coated phonebook-papershell. An appropriate tree is selected, it's trunk bottom might need to be reworked or pruned of foliage (especially the Noch ones, but more on that for another episode) to ensure it can plug into the hole.

Often, the bottom skirt of foliage might need to be trimmed, especially if the tree is being planted on a steep hillside (in which case a side is chopped off per the below), and in this case the bottom of the trunk might have to be bent thus so it can plug horizontally into a vertical cliff face:

A generous blob of PVA is applied to the base of the trunk and it is plugged into the scenery. Some trees might have to be encouraged to stand up straight with cardboard props:

But once they have set, they can be gently straightened by holding the base with fine pliers and bending the trunk up. Below is a work in progress as there's nothing worse than having your trees all listing at haphazard angles...

Bulk Scenic Update

An update on the ongoing periodic dribble of scenic progress over the past month or two, as I don't remember where I left off in my dispatches...

• The church is in, but you knew that already
• There's a bit of foundation scenery going into the mid Meinreuss gorge area before tree-ing
• There is a road bridge in that gorge too. I used one of the cut-stone-style ones printed out for Wattinger. This one probably should be a concrete arch bridge, but it will be hard to see in there when the trees go in. 
• The hill in the distant corner of the pic below has had a bit of foundation scenery and mid-foliage added
• There's a wee bit of foliage and tree scenery by the (unfinished) tunnel portal at the far end of the middle level and in the Wattinger gorge under the road bridge
• But the main news.... (ta-da) is that the middle level has finally been painted and ballasted

Painting rails is a job always dreaded, and this was a fairly long stretch, but I put some music on and just plowed through the four rails-worth of work with a small paintbrush a week ago.

As you can see (or hopefully can't see) below, this time I remembered to add in a few fake sleepers under the rail joints. I always forget to do this on layouts and then grizzle about it later, as it looks so obvious when the ballast goes down.

Slow, but notable progress. The ballast really makes things look a lot better.

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.