The hill becomes a mountain, track testing & more!

Today I continued to blindly plough ahead with my mountain building.   Honestly, I'm not at all sure how this will come out, but at least I'm having a crash at it.   Below you can see the overall progress as it stands now.  I have the far side of the tunnel set in plaster cloth (still drying as I write) and the tunnel roughed in in foam blocks.  My current plan is to build the near side of the tunnel next, in much the same way, and then construct the top separately, and keep it removable to allow access to the track inside.

Innovation abounds!  I've started masking my track before dribbling on it!

I cast abutments for my viaduct using some plaster/spackle type stuff that goes on pink and dries white, which is great.  Tomorrow I'll sand it smooth, square it, and give it a coat of Polyscale "Aged Concrete".  I expect it'll be mostly hidden by my roadbed, but this gap needed filling and what does peek through should look good.

You may have noticed in the first photo that I've got a new shelf on the wall.  I built this three years ago and only now put it up!  Easy project, took an evening, and cost about $15 for lumber and screws and about the same again on flextrack.  I think an extra 1/2" height in the shelves would have made it better, but it serves it's purpose well.

Corner clamps make building stuff like this (and your benchwork) really easy.

On the shelves are some miscellaneous bits and pieces I've been using to test track.  The big green north american box car that entirely does not match anything I own but was a very well intentioned gift) has proven extremely valuable as it is the tallest car I own.  This means it's my tunnel clearance test mule.

On the shelf below are three very long German passenger cars, these are for testing curves for clearances and aesthetics.

Bottom shelf features some very forgiving (read short 2 axle) european freight stock, good to use for watching cars wobble on the tracks to find little kinks and such.

The locomotive on the top right is a BWI E8A with sound, and those of you who have messed about with N scale sound will know that engines like this are bloodhounds for finding connectivity issues.   It need only cross a dirty rail for the sound to cycle through the startup sequence.  Rather then get annoyed I have chosen to embrace this fault detection feature.


Dear Readers:  Was this post more than you wanted to know?  Please leave a comment.  I'm new at this and still groping for the the right balance of content quantity vs. content quality.  Too many rail blogs go dead for weeks at a time, I do not want to be one of those, but I also do not want to waste your time.  Would you rather see one post covering 3 weeks of hill/river/tunnel work, or posts like this one walking you through the details.  Do you want ugly photos showing the process, or pretty pictures of polished results?  Let me know please!

-Jaggy

Procrastination, mental blocks, a river update and a new tunnel too!

Yesterday I realized I have been procrastinating.  I have been largely focused on completing my min line, building benchwork segment by segment, laying track, wiring, testing, and on to the next segment- but I have stalled.  The past few days have seen me disassemble a minitrix BR class 3.10 completely, fiddle with the innards, reassemble and repeat about 10 times.  I'll post a review of this locomotive eventually but the sort version for now is this:  It's always been a poor runner, I took it apart to make it better, broke it in three ways, and then spent days sorting it out.   The story has a happy ending thanks to my wife, who in her spare time used to make jewelry and so had the patience and know how to mend my mangled drive rods.  Anyhow, point is, I allowed myself to get hugely distracted and put off the ongoing track project.  I should add, I am really keen to get my track sorted, I can't wait till it actually forms a loop and I can run some trains about without the contant worry of something flying off the table.

So, what's the hold up?  It's me.  To lay the next bit of track I need to cross my river, which means my viaduct needs to be in place, which means the viaduct piers and abutments need to be in place, which means the river needs to be in place (unless I plan to add it after the bridge is fixed, which seems misguided), which means the river banks need to be there, which means the hillside that slopes into the banks needs to be there, which means the hill in the corner probably needs to be there- and I've not built a real hill yet.  And that is the blocker.  Building the hill.  I'e had some abortive attempts at making mountains before, and the product has always been lacking.  Now I'm facing with building a hill on my 'real' layout, the one I want to keep, the one that must be good, and so I've been paralyzed for fear of fucking it up.   I've watched videos, read blogs, looked at photos, gone to a forest to collect dirt and rocks, and done everything else short of actually doing it that I can think of.  

Having realized this I decided to just plunge in.   In the worst case I'll rebuild it many times and it'll eventually be good, and in the best case it'll be good enough for now.  So here I go:

I used cut styrofoam sheets to delineate the internal tunnel shape for the track inside, and then balled up wrapping paper (visible in the back right) to form a shape and went at it with plaster cloth.  I intend to make the tunnel top a removable segment, though I've not worked out how yet.  We shall see.  I have found that any inaccessible track invariably goes wrong, gets dirty or finds some other means to have issues.

In my river, I used that green foam for flower arraigning to form a base and have been casting rocks for my banks.  Had I done this before I would have started in the back and worked my way forward, oh well.

I removed my placeholder plywood bridge (which seemed like a good idea but actually provided no benefit) and put the real one in.  Painting back there will be really hard, but at least the reach in is only 24".  

Here's my tunnel portal on the opposite side, just sitting loose, so I can get a sense of it.  You can see the white edge where I've been sanding the walls so they fit flush.   My mossy wall was a happy surprise, I accidentally dribbled some glue, it didn't clean up well, so I dusted the wal with ground cover to hide it and made it better, I think, in the process.  

This will look good one day.  Just you wait and see!

And finally, comments for the blog are now enabled!  Seems they were off by default (thanks Jerry!), so please feel free to add what you will.  I've made it as easy as possible, no 'verify you are a human number codes' or delayed posting.  We'll see how it goes.  Provided I'm not spammed into oblivion I'll leave it as accessible as possible, so you have no excuse!

Beginning the river

My layout plan has always featured a large bridge as a focal point.  This week I started building this portion of the layout.  In order to give the bridge more height I wanted to lower the table the bridge spawns, so I built the benchwork below. 

My valley is 80mm lower then the surrounding terrain and 300mm wide. This will allow the use of Faller viaduct rail bridges to spawn it for the lower line.  I then built a placeholder for my big bridge, so I wouldn't damage my model while working on the area.  As you can see the Faller viaduct piers will need a little extension to meet the track height.  I've now roughed in some basic riverbank shapes with that green foam used for flower arrangement.