Ground cover and backdrop buildings

 I've been busy putting down ground cover around the industrial area.  I start with a base of a light brown ground foam, and then add green grass and/or some dark earth color, depending on the area.  Closer to the steel buildings meant more of the dark color.  I'm trying to avoid any monotones.  I kinda feel like a lot of this is too green though.  Maybe it will look better when I add some weeds and bushes.

I also built a backdrop building with some scrap pieces.  It's a generic steel mill building that fits that spot.  I also put an old building I had from years ago across from it.  Those may fill those spots well.  

Lessons learned:

1. Get several colors of ground foam and use them in tandem.  
2. Those Caboose ground throws for the switches are great...except for the ones that come undone when you use them, or the ones that aren't sprung all the way.  Of course those tend to be the ones that are the least accessible.  
3. Sometimes I think I'd like to re-do some of the track arrangement...someday.  After all this is done.  I'd like to reach that point first.

Next up:
1. I should make more trees.
2. A little scene on the other side of the shipping channel.
3. Finish the rest of the ground cover around the industrial area.
4. Signage for more buildings. It does make a difference.

Chemical Plant

It's been a long time since I've posted on here, but that doesn't mean I haven't been working on the layout.  Most of the work has been on trees - that will be a separate post when that area is done.  Trees are a project, you make a batch at a time, then don't get to it again till you have the time for another batch.

This is Walthers' Chemical Distributor kit. I have several tank cars, and I needed to send them somewhere. Niagara Falls, near here, is home to many chemical plants, so I thought this would be a good fit in front of the grain elevator. 

Those little loading platforms were a giant pain to put together.  Getting everything to stay in place while the glue dried.  

Walthers seems to like to use the same building (this warehouse structure) for various kits.  

I still hate working with plaster. But when you mix it just right, it does smooth out better.  Not great, but better.

This whole scene has come together, and what's left is to put in some ground cover and details. It's amazing how much space I'll use for something like this, when like a 4x8 table seemed big.

Lessons learned:

1. Get the right consistency on Woodland Scenics Smooth-It plaster and it will work..as best as it can for you.
2. Next time, plan the sides of the warehouse building not based on the kit directions, but how you plan to orient it on the layout.  Thus why the truck doors are on the back, and the side door is on the far side...not what I intended, but that's how it fits in the end.

What's next:

More trees.  Another little scene there with a crane and stone for breakwater repairs (like a prototype scene at the harbor here).  And probably more trees.

Another little business

I finished another little business to fill in an area between the brewery and the suburbs.  I just needed something small, and the Pikestuff General Contractor kit looked good.  

This was one of the worst kits I've built so far.  Seriously, this thing looks like something that should take you 20 minutes tops, not counting waiting for paint to dry.  Except Pikestuff wanted to get cute - to make it a "kitbasher series" kit, it meant you had to cut the door holes yourself, and you had to cut the walls to size.  Don't screw these up, because it's not like you have any extra parts.  They said it was some kind of different styrene, which required that brush-on solvent, so I used that.  What a pain.  That stuff never works well for me.  Whenever I would get a couple parts together, and tried connecting other parts, the first ones would come apart.  In the end I just used the old Testors non-toxic glue I've been using, and what do you know, it worked fine.  In the end I got a nice little building, but man what a pain in the behind. 

I made it an office for Encorus - my brother works there, it's an engineering and testing firm.  The building isn't exactly like theirs but I matched the color scheme.  I still need to do some ground cover around it, but I wanted to get a photo up of progress so far.

The whole scene is coming together.  I have to figure out what kind of natural growth to put in between it all, and it should be good.

Underpass area

 A lot of the time I spend "working" on the layout is just...looking and thinking.  I've found that trying to do anything too quickly just means that I don't like what I did and I have to re-do/un-do it.  I made a lot of "progress" (if you want to call it that, since the last post here) on the area around the underpass.  I had to come up with some background images, which isn't easy when you're trying to get various things to fit together from the right sizes and angles.  The steel warehouse structure is still un-named, I haven't figure out what they're going to do there.  But those are pretty ubiquitous around here, they store things, they fabricate things, they ship things.  I still hate working with plaster, but I had enough left to create the blacktop areas around the building.  Part of me is like, man I fit more into a 4x8 table when I was younger, how does this take up so much space? The answer is, because I'm putting a more realistic (using that term loosely) amount of truck space around it.  

It's almost half a year later, but the 3 cars here (an acid tank car, a Pan Am Railways boxcar, and a short mill gondola) came from the train show in Springfield, MA in January.  That was the first time I've ever gone, and it's one of those things in life where the hype doesn't even match the reality.  It makes every other train show seem piddly by comparison.  I bought three cars and we had to tell ourselves, okay no more cars, but we could spend money on this or that.  The size and scope just has to be seen to be believed.  Unfortunately it's at about the worst time of the year for making a road trip, but the weather opened up just enough for this.  

Lessons learned:

1. Print out lots of different options for a backdrop image, so you can compare them.  What I ended up using was nowhere near what I first thought.  
2. Don't glue anything on there till you're sure.
3. I've said it before, I'll say it again - keeping spare parts from past building kits comes in handy.  I had enough parts to make a backdrop building for a Sonwil warehouse.  
4. I still don't totally like what I did with the road fading into the distance - I feel like my freshman year high school art teacher would tell me I did it wrong - but there are enough times I go downstairs and it looks alright.

Up next:

1. Finish ground cover around that area, and let's make some trees.
2. A small building I have in mind to fill in an area between the brewery complex and the suburbs.
3. The chemical distributor kit for the other side of the layout.
4. I bought some chain-link fence kits.  I feel like you could use a hundred of those if you wanted.  Pretty much every business you see has fencing around it.  I feel like the trick is, how do you place some fences around to give the illusion there's fencing around, without literally doing so.

October update

 I think I'm calling the sand distributor "done" for now. I kept adding things.  Beyond just the building, I added a truck scale and the thing beneath it.  Best I can tell, they load sand into it, it rolls it around to separate out the finest particles, from which they can get a consistent product to ship.  I scratchbuilt this thing from a styrene tube, some styrene pieces, a couple pieces of corrugated styrene, and some surplus handrails and pipe.  I used a combination of Woodland Scenics ground cover, clumps, and some Heki tear apart tall grass that Thomas Klimoski used on his Georgia Northeastern layout. Like the rest of this - it's not perfectly to scale.  My aim was to get something that looks like it, rather than exactly like it. If I went a step further - I would have to build that dust collector in the process between this thing and the building. Whenever I drive past it on Route 5, I'm pretty pleased I came up with something that anyone looking at it would recognize.

At the prototype, I'm told they've been offloading the sand from lake freighters, which gets trucked across town to the Norfolk Southern yard and loaded onto covered hoppers. Once upon a time there were railroad tracks there. Apparently this is the cheapest way to do this right now.

Lessons learned:

1. Anything and everything you build looks better with some handrails/guardrails. 
2. Why did I make the circular towers so tall? Because that Walthers conical thing is that tall, and they needed to be taller based on the prototype. Don't be tough on yourself if something isn't exact. My steel mill isn't even close to the scale size it should be - but it still looks like a steel mill. Good enough.
3. I'm still annoyed that I made the shipping channel too deep.  But there's no fixing that at this point.  We have to pretend that it was a deep cut there and the freighters can onload on a higher level. Whatever.

What's next: I don't know. I'm not sure how to connect the scenery in that corner to the steel mill around the bend. Maybe it's time to do some scenery around the brewery.

Long update

I realized I haven't updated this in quite some time.  I've made some significant progress on the river channel end of the layout.

Background - I printed out a couple appropriate buildings for the background, plus a Corps of Engineers derrickboat for the channel.  I'm not sure if I printed these in the right proportion, but they look okay so far.  I couldn't really get them any bigger.  

Sand distributor - in Buffalo along Route 5, there's a sand distributor that receives loads of sand from self-unloading lake freighters.  Colloquially it's known as "the dunes" because sometimes they have huge mounds of sand there.  I tried my best to scratchbuild/kitbash something looking like this.

I used a combination of a Walthers Grain Surge Bin, a Walthers Grain Conveyor, the end building from the Walthers power station, and two pieces of PVC pipe.  I feel like what I've built, while not completely accurate, effectively conveys the look of the complex.

I still need to put scenery around there.  Piles of sand, some bushes and weeds, and a front end loader.  It fits the need for a focal point for that space, in transition from the steel mills to the river.

I hate using any of those piping things.  I built them semi-connected, because I knew they wouldn't stay that way.  The buildings are semi-secured like the houses were around 4 nails inside.  The silos don't stay that way very well.  I learned you can't really glue PVC pipe to anything, but that styrene sorta stays on.  I at least glued the surge bin and conveyor to a piece of styrene so they would stay together.  I guarantee at some point this will come un-done.

Up next:

1. Scenery around the sand distributor.

2. I bought a pack of SuperTrees - I'll have to try to make some.

3. Start scenery around the brewery.

August progress

 I've found that it often takes a lot of time to think about what you're going to do and how you're going to do it.  Track, wiring, placement of buildings, etc.  Then once you start, and it works, then it's just a matter of doing that thing over and over.  Once I figured out a blend of ground cover that seemed to look like what would be around a steel mill property, I could do a little every day.  So I've got a lot done back around those buildings.

I got some trees to place around the suburban scene.  Some mid-range ones from Woodland Scenics that are a puff of material with ground cover foam on it, and some top-range ones in back that have nice trunks with clumps of material stuck on there.  A lot of the clumps fall off and I can't figure out how to get it back on, but there's more than enough already on there.  I installed these by drilling a small hole in the homasote base and sticking the little knob at the bottom of the trunk in.  I would like to get some SuperTrees as well, but these look nice.  Trees in a suburban Boston neighborhood are old and big and I wanted them to tower over the houses a bit.

I also built a little station sign for the commuter rail platform.  There's no "Norwood" station, there's Norwood Depot and Norwood Central, but this is supposed to be somewhat fictional.  I feel like the posts are a little too thick...but it needed to be able to stand and not get easily broken.  I built it with styrene and glued it to the platform.

Lessons learned:

1. I tried that brush-on plastic solvent but I needed to use the glue again.  I still don't get how that works.
2. Get plenty of different colors before you start putting down ground cover.  A mix of colors looks more realistic.

Next up:
The billboard along the highway.  I got the Walthers kit, I just need to build it and make it taller.
More ground cover around the steel mill.
More details around the suburbs, and more trees.