Shell Wassen

Today I had a crack at the petrol station alluded to in the previous post, and to my surprise had it glued down within two hours.

The real thing has a wooden upper floor on a concrete block lower, with an angled extension out front that I declined to model, out of both laziness and a lack of space.

For the top half I used some grossly overscale but decent looking faller card sheet, with an overlay of roof-slate-printed Faller card for the bottom concrete blocks. The black bits are for the big windows downstairs.

And overlaid:

The 'concrete block' bits were overpainted beforehand with a light grey so the detail would still show through, and the roof later painted darker, as these were made from the same card material. 

As usual, its all a bit hokey and out-of-square, but it looks OK from a distance.  The canopy sides were painted yellow and some red decal stripes added. I considered putting 'Shell' and Mattli' signs up, but I doubt they would want to be associated with such a crooked model.

Under the canopy are some white pieces of wire poked into the foamboard road and a few bits of plastic rod for petrol pumps. If I wasn't so lazy I would have put some red and yellow on them before sticking them down.

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. 

Regunking the EANOS

While I was pottering away with the scenery on North Wattinger, someone posted a picture on Facebook or somewhere of a nicely weathered SBB EANOS wagon in HO scale, a bit like my pink Marklin Z one. 

So using his one for ideas, I dug mine out and added a little more rust and dust and grime on top of what was already there - looking back, I'm not sure I have ever posted anything about this wagon. 

Some ordinary thinned acrylic paint plus some rust and grime washes were used. It looks a bit overdone, stark and harsh in these closeup pics...

...but looks OK from the mandated viewing distance below (pic from the previous post on North Wattinger).

I didn't like the pink colour scheme originally and was going to repaint in grey, but the pink has grown on me as it is something a little different.

The load that came with this has always looked a little boring, even with some additions on top of the factory load, so I might make it carry logs one day.

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!

The second coming.

It's been quite some time since I've haunted these pages. More than two years in fact.

The reason was that our house had a bit of a refurbishment last year, and all delayed because of the pandemic, so the layout was put down in a back corner of the basement and covered in plastic.

All the rolling stock and modelling materials were boxed away, and there everything has hibernated for a while. 

I suppose I should have unearthed this all six months ago, but haven't really been in the mood. My little modelling workstation and chair are still stored at the other end of town, but I found most of the goodies, except many of the glues have dried up. 

Still there, wonder if sitting vertically for year has warped it...

What got me thinking about Z again were two things:

1. Marklin has announced an Re 6/6!! Woohoo! This expensive little baby has a new coreless motor, so I hope it works with the 4/4s.
2. The recent purchase of a Marklin 88270 Sdgmns (or thereabouts) intermodal well car with a Sarotti Schokolade (mmm, yummy) trailer and a truck as well. It's not often that modern-era Z stuff comes up on our local auction website TradeMe.

I've never seen one of these model well cars in the flesh, but have never liked them in pictures. They seem too 'tall' to me. I plan to make it look a little more like this:

I figure I'll ease back into modelling by starting on the trailer. The first thing I notice is that my eyes don't seem to work like they did a or two year ago, so I dug out my magnifying light. The second is that the modern era trailers have three axles, are longer and sit lower on their road wheels than the toylike Marklin offering. 

So I started by making a new box from styrene. I was going to build it with humped roof like in the prototype pic here, but decided that a flat one would have less chance of making a mess. I believe both are valid options for these Mainsped trailers. The bottomless box was painted an approximation of Mainsped brown on most of its faces.

The Marklin two axle trailer was chopped apart. It was split between the axles and reconstructed on a styrene floor. The truck gave up two of its (slightly thinner) rear wheels, and these were slipped between the existing trailer axles to give me three. 

The curtainsides were from a bunch of container images that I photoshopped and had printed off a few years ago. Fortunately I had included one of these.

The chassis was slipped inside the box and voila. Not too bad for a few hours work. Most of that was trying to paint the wheels. 

As a postscript, I chopped the Sarotti Schokolade box in half and put it onto of the now-lame truck (it has no rear wheels on the other side).  It might be put to work delivering chocolate to my Volg store in Wassen. Yes I will cover up that hideous contact glue beforehand.