Plodding along

After procuring some little trees and other little supplies from a distant hobby shop yesterday, a rare visit to the trainroom yielded an appropriately little dollop of progress this afternoon.

Although not entirely prototypical (but then again, the real township is less spatially-challenged than my model) I decided to remove my highway overpass -as foretold in a previous post - and replace it with a tunnel portal to give my mini-Wassen-church-hill the impression of more hight.

A portal was constructed from my diminishing stocks of slate roof material and tested for clearance - of which there is minimal...

And then some skinny strips of card used to flesh out the hill after the innards were darkened. 

I'm feeling this will work better than the previous ideas for this wee scene. It's not prototypical, everything is smushed into a tiny space, but such is life when you are building Wassen on a Door. The far end of this tunnel (and its not that far) isn't that easy to see, so will probably remain cavernously open so I can stick a hand in for track cleaning.


Finally, a little paint was splashed onto the parts of the south hill and the nearby top-level adjustments which had a glue-and-yellow-pages shell. The hole in the corner will be the last one on the layout to be filled, remaining open for testing and cleaning until the thing is deemed as bulletproof as its ham-fisted builder can certify.

Moving Mountains

Down the south hill end, a bit of solid hillside has sprung up. 

While doing this, a couple of small areas were also adjusted.

In looking at real pictures taken from The Command Post on the third level of track, it seems that the uphill portal of the Meinkreutz (I'm sure I've spelt that incorrectly, but it's the obvious bit of landscaping visible at the right side of these two pictures) is a rockface bore rather than a stone-faced portal. 

So I've trimmed that back per the prototype and as a bonus have gained an extra inch of visible trackage up there. 

Additional visible running has been realised on the middle level, where I've pushed back the tunnel/gallerie entrance to gain another three or four inches in the process.

If I keep going at this rate I'll soon have no hidden trackage left.

Prefab scenery - 2

After my portable hill's paint had dried, grassy material was attached to the steep sides with it laid out flat and a box underneath to catch glue dribbles.

After that, it was stood up and grass added to the tops of the hill. As always I'm dribbling on isopropyl alcohol (the cleaning/medical kind, not the drinking kind) as the wetting agent and following up with diluted PVA white glue.

The hill was then laid down on its side again for some forestry work:

Trees and scrubby bushes were planted. In the above shot, the trees are being encouraged to set 'straight' with some props.

Ideally, I'd have liked more pines/spruces/whatever-they-are here, but elected to spend seven pines of my collection here, and filled in the rest of the space with various ground foam, fine leaf foliage and even old rubberised clusters collected over many years.

As I always say: variety in size, colour and texture really helps while scenicing.

The prominent bank of grass on the real thing is visible to the right here, and other misc items large and small have been planted along the track and in the boring bits to make things look interesting. The hill was propped up at 45 degrees to make this easier to see without bushes rolling down the slopes.

Again, it's all rather easy when you are focusing on a small section right in front of your face that can be flipped to any angle that suits you.

Then it was time to plug the hill into place for a look. Could be worse.

Prefab scenery is a winner, with being able to comfortably focus on a small section being only one of its advantages.

In hindsight, it would have been best to do all my 'prominent' scenery that's hard to get at in this way (if it wasn't needed to be in place as a structural/stiffening element as my bigger hills are) and it's going to be hard to go back to working on those big hills, the village, and the tight Meienreuss valley with its bridges.

If (when!) I ever have serious issues with my hidden trackage (spirals, or yard), it certainly would have been far easier to detach one of these lightly-glued-in prefab sections rather than hacking into the permanent scenery with a saw. Even small hatches that could be cut out...

Prefab scenery - 1

When we were kids at school in New Zealand, most schools had 'prefab' (prefabricated) classrooms to compliment the larger, well-built wings of school rooms. Prefabs were kitset standalone classrooms built (or partially built) offsite and trucked in, ready to go in times of need....

One of the issues with the Wassen layout is that it is quite deep - so it's hard to work on the top level from the 'viewing' side without a considerable stretch.

Also, because Switzerland is quite '3D' in nature, I often find myself planting grass and scenery on near-vertical hillsides, which offers a challenge to get trees to stand vertical, and to attach scenic items with diluted PVA glue without it all rolling down the hill and settling in a puddle on your nice track at the bottom.

So the idea of a prefab section is being tried here.

Basically I pinned down a foamboard 'floor' (flat, white, snakey thing beside the tracks) :

A 'back wall' for my prefab hill was cut from another scrap of foamboard and suspended in space, being pinned to the piece of backscene that had sprung up recently at left and to a bit of scenery at right. Ribs made of the same material were roughly cut out and applied. After this, it was time to sit back and watch the glue set.

Next morning, the pins could be removed, which allowed the skeleton to be removed, and card webbing glued on with a hot-glue gun.

Diluted PVA-soaked paper was applied to the top in a glueshell (much easier being able to do this with the portable piece laying down flat or being held vertically as needed):

Now with convenient carry handle.

This was then painted dark green as usual. Let the scenicking begin!

meanwhile, under the South Hill.

Now that some progress has been made on the northern hill of the layout, it's time to turn some attention to the southern end.

So a start was made with some backdrops - the same foamboard that has been for the whole layout.

An L-angle spine in the corner...

And some backdrop...

...and there it stops. 

It would have been nice to continue scenicking the hill, but, there's been something missing under it which needed to be sorted out. 

You see, the inner of the two storage tracks up at the upper-level 'station' was never completed because I ran out of track. The track was purchased about a year ago, but never installed, so now seems like as good a time as any. 

N scale cork underlay added to give the required height (as I'm using flex here as part of my messy mishmash of MicroTrains points, Rokuhan curves and Peco and Microtrains flex).

Track added!

It must be about time to see if this still runs. 

Making (north) mountains out of a molehill

Some glue and paper shell added today on top of the cardboard strip mesh on the north hill.

Who knows what model railroaders will do when they stop making phone directories.

As you might have noticed from a close perusal of the North End, in our town, we get a combined White and Yellow Pages, just to add a bit of spice.

A touch of green paint from the dollar store (2D scenery in a tube) and it's starting to look more like a model railway.

Starting the North Hill

I ventured into the trainroom yesterday armed with a gluegun and cardboard, and before you know it, had bodged up one of the two 'big' hills on the layout.

This one, at the 'northern' end of Wassen, sits above the church and big 'middle Meinreuss' viaduct.

Bounded by a freshly installed backscene, the hill hides a spiral of track that allows for some elevation gain on the model between the middle and upper Meinreuss bridges.

The backscene (white) has been cut away and both it and the hillside support each other, providing good access to the hidden trackage of the spiral and also the staging yard below for cleaning, maintenance and to deal with any incidents! 

View from the Wattinger end.

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.

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...