Fascia

Over the past two weekends I installed the fascia panels on the sides.  I had plenty of hardboard pieces leftover from the backdrops a couple years ago so I didn't need to buy anything else.  Plus some leftover grey paint.  This was pretty easy - cut the pieces to size, drill pilot holes, screw them in, prime and paint.  As some model railroading sources have pointed out, these really make the whole thing look neater and nicer. 

Next up: ballasting the track.  After that, we'll need to plan and learn how to model water for the river channel, and plan out more of the structures around the steel mill area.  I'd like to put that grain elevator into play and perhaps a malting plant next to it, and some other steel-related structures.  Maybe a pipe mill, a boiler house too.

Lessons learned:

1. These don't need to be perfect.  Sometimes they don't fit snugly next to each other.  Sometimes they need some shims underneath to even things out. Whatever, good enough.
2. I've found that buying the tools you need is never a bad investment.  Buy something good that will last.  You'll learn how to use it and odds are you'll need it again.  At which point, you can put that previous knowledge to work.

South curve

For a while now, I've looked at the south curves - in particular the outer track - and have been dissatisfied with them.  I realized that the easement into the turn wasn't easy enough, but for the boxcars I had this was no trouble.  It just didn't look nice.  Well, those Exactrail gondolas changed things.  For all the detail, the proper weight and metal wheels, they sure are finicky.  They had a habit of jumping the tracks with one of the trailing wheels at a couple spots.  Plus, the yearly problem with the track coming un-glued in that curve (which I have deduced is most likely because of the changes in humidity over the course of different seasons).  I hadn't allowed enough room for the rails to 'move'.  After I got done painting the track, I thought the next step would be to ballast it.  And it's a lot easier to re-do this before ballasting than after.  So I managed to pry up the track and the cork, carefully, by running an x-acto knife under it.  I worked out a more shallow easement into the curve which ended up using as much of the space along that end that I had.  (Throwing out the whole "keeping the track 5 inches from the edge", I'll need a little wall along the end to keep disasters at bay).  I decided to just tack all this down with track nails rather than glue, partly so I could adjust it now, and partly so maybe this allows it some room to stretch.  After plenty of playing around, it's not great but it's a lot better.  Those bleeping gondolas make it through there almost every time now.  I kinda want to keep playing with it but it's alright.  I managed to add a 6-inch piece of track to address the added length of the run.



Something like this bugs the heck out of me, so it became a priority to get it fixed.

Lessons learned:

1. If you're going to re-do track, do it before ballasting.  I decided not to learn this the hard way.
2. Re-wiring these was a pain.  I had them nicely connected under the rails before, but I had to snip the wires and re-attach them in the new positions.  I don't know why this was trickier than before, maybe I'm just out of practice.  But I tested the track and everything works again.
3. Paper shims and styrene pieces for the slight superelevation are useful to ease the train into the curve and keep it from derailing.  Also, as you run the cars along the rails, you can tell if the easement is too tight that there's a little tension to them there.  That's probably where the engine is briefly helping to pull them off the rails. 
4. When you're planning for curves - make them as big, wide, and easy as you can.  I thought I already had, and oddly enough the inner curve works fine.  It's this outer one that needed work.  But a layout should always be "in process".  Always something to improve.

Thanksgiving progress

First - I completed the overpass.  Pretty much.  For now.  The road is paved, painted and striped; the bridge girders are secured to the sides.  I like how the whole thing came out, and I expect it'll look even better with some trees, ground cover, and details someday.  I still have to figure out guardrails for the middle of the road, and eventually some traffic signals at the intersection.

Second - I "finished" painting the track.  Krylon Camouflage Flat Brown spray paint, once over each side and once down the middle, then use a rag to wipe off the top.  Then a track cleaning block to clean off any remaining paint.  I ran a train around a few times to make sure everything runs, and I'd say it's no worse than before.  And it looks good.  Even better someday when I get to ballasting....

Third - which leads us into, two steps forward one step back.  I've been annoyed by one of the turns for some time and only tonight screwed together the guts to rip it up.  Well, pry it up.  Carefully using an exacto knife, I was able to pry up the track along that area and I'm experimenting with a better arrangement.  A more gradual entrance to the turn.  Those expensive Exactrail gondolas like to hop the rails, especially entering that turn.  I thought it's best to address this now rather than after I do the ballast.

Lessons learned:

1. That Krylon paint dries faster than I had read elsewhere that it would.  Waiting 10 minutes meant it was pretty dry and I needed to use a knife to scrape off the paint.  After that, I waited maybe 30 seconds and got right to wiping it off.  Worked great from there.
2. If you can, plan to do this in the summer, when it's feasible to have all the windows open.  I picked a 45 degree day, which was as good as we're going to get in late November here.  It just meant the house was kinda cold for the day.
3. Err on the side of caution and mask/move anything remotely near where you're spraying.  It's less trouble than ruining/having to repaint something else later.

Inspiration

Besides the sites listed on the right menu, I've found some inspiration from some railroad videos.  Here are a few I came across this week.

Cleveland Steel Mill Railroading - "The Crow"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gG9hx8eFS4

I'm particularly intrigued by the short flat cars they're using to transport steel slabs.  The trick will be to find some plain steel flat cars to use that will get around some tight curves.

CP 502 in East Chicago, Indiana at Arcelor Mittal

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DpGkPn2WSYc

Some more short flats with steel slab loads.  Also of interest is some of the scenery - it's not completely devoid of plant life.  I'll also need to include some high tension power lines in there.

Roads to somewhere

I finished off a lot of the work on the underpass and associated roadways.  These were created with Woodland Scenics Smooth-It plaster, painted with Woodland Scenics asphalt colored top coat, and striped with Woodland Scenics striping pens.  As I found the top coat was easily scratched, when all this was done I sprayed it with a Rustoleum clear flat matte.  This gave it a little more of a shine than I would've liked but I'll balance that with the fact that it should hold up to my little nephew driving Matchbox cars on it.  I still have to attach the side girders to the overpass - these have been glued together and painted.  I'm planning to paint the track along there before I attach these, I kinda think I should do that first.

Overall I'm pleased with how this turned out.  You'd be surprised how wide a road actually is.  When you added up four lanes and a median (to allow for the turning lane at the intersection and for the road to get around the center support beams), it's a good 10 inches wide.  The road between the buildings is a little narrow, as is the parking lot for the brewery offices. I had to use a little artistic license with these to allow for room for everything.  If I could do anything different, I would work further on how to make the road more of a curved approach underneath rather than the strict ramp that it is.  It's the best I could figure out for the problem.  This scene still needs guardrails around the support columns; some more touch-up paint between the rails through the pavement; and ground cover for the embankments.  Eventually the road is going to continue into a small residential neighborhood, but that's way down the line.

Next up: painting the track.  I have the paint I need, as well as the track cleaning products too. 

Lessons learned:

1. You find you have time to work on the layout when winter is starting to show up outside, but if what you're doing involves some kind of aerosol spray, you'll need to deal with the complication of opening some windows.
2. Give some thought to intersections - all the little markings like stopping lines, crosswalks, turn lanes, etc.  Google Street View will give you the answers you need.
3. Woodland Scenics striping pens - they're a little tricky to use.  You have to vent them once by pressing down on the top part, then press it down 2-3 times until the tip fills with paint.  Except sometimes it doesn't want to flow, so you press down again, and now a ton of it blobs out. Do this over a surface other than your road.  Once it is flowing properly however, it makes a really nice (albeit narrow) straight line.  It's a big improvement over what you can do with a brush.  Your best bet is to plan out all the markings you're going to need to do so you can get the things working right and get it all done at once.

Fun with plaster, and fancy gondolas

Fun?  Not quite.  Despite some practice on the side with using Woodland Scenics' Smooth-It road plaster, it hasn't worked out as well as it looks in the how-to videos.  As much as I tried, the plaster never set nicely smooth.  It had some bumps, ruts, rolls, and divots no matter what I did.  Which meant I had a good reason to finally buy a shop-vac, because sanding that plaster creates a lot of dust.  In the end I had to just mix some more to fill in the holes and sand from there.  I hope (Hope) that it looks better with the asphalt colored paint.  But like a lot of this layout, I have to live with the fact that some things aren't going to be perfect, they're going to be as good as I can do them.  The section that is just two lanes wide was probably the easiest to do - I think the whole process isn't designed for a space really wide all at once.

I created a small parking lot for the brewery, a large one for the truck bays for the brewhouse/distributor building, and another large one for trucks at the printing press.  The road will conceivably continue on from there, but I haven't figured out what's going on beyond that.  I still have to mark out some sidewalks on the main road that goes under the tracks.  I know, I didn't make them a higher level - the problem was the part under the tracks, there's no way I could do that with my limited skills yet.  So I'll carve out some lines and paint it concrete colored.

I tested the locomotive and it successfully navigated the tracks through the pavement.  Mostly.  I have to clean them up some more, make sure all the plaster is off the inside and tops of the rails.

In other news, I bought a couple modern Thrall gondolas.  I figured the steel mill complex was going to need at least a few of them.  I splurged on the ExactRail ones - wow, they're nice.  You can immediately tell the difference in price between that and an old Roundhouse kit is reflected in the detail, smooth running metal wheels, and properly weighted chassis.  However, they were longer than they seemed in the pictures.  They're -just- short enough to get through some tight curves in the mill complex.  It would've been super disappointing if they couldn't make it.  They almost derail at a couple points but they make it.  Good enough.  Paired with an Athearn Genesis locomotive they look really good.

Lessons learned:

1. Make sure you know the size of the car you're buying.  Even then, you may have to actually run it to find out.
2. Save some of the leftover plaster debris, and crush and wet it later to use for filling in holes and divots. 
3. Remove that Woodland Scenics paving tape sooner rather than later, because it won't come off easily later.
4. Watch out for the Kadee couplers and how they navigate the track within the pavement.  I have a couple that seem to dig into some of it.
5. I just rolled with the given height of the Micro Engineering bridge supports.  I had to cut the Walthers abutments to fit.  But as I've looked at it...they seem a little tall for a road.  In hindsight maybe they were designed to go over a railroad track.  Oh well, we've gone too far to change that now.  We'll just say that it's designed to allow for really tall truck traffic underneath.  Safe to say, no moving trucks are going to get Storrow'ed on my layout.

Next up: Painting the roads, looking into striping and details for them, masking out and painting the sidewalks.  Cutting and fitting ties in the spaces where the flex track connects each other.  Re-securing some sections of track that seem to come loose every summer/winter when the temperature and humidity change a lot.  Painting the rails - I obtained some of the flat dark brown camouflage spray paint recommended in a post by Mike Confalone.  Then ballasting.  I figure all of that stuff will keep me pretty busy for a while going forward.

Underpass Part 2

I've made continued progress on the underpass.  First of all, I cut the Walthers double track abutments and wings to the proper size and glued them in place.  The color was close but I did paint them with the same aged concrete color Rustoleum paint I've used in other projects.  I will place the bridge support columns later.  After a lot of thought and reading about some methods, I went with some cardboard supports on the embankments.  I built from there with strips of Woodland Scenics plaster cloth.  On the left side I found that the plaster cloth didn't sit as taut as I imagined, so I had augment some parts later with more strips.  On the right side, I used some masking tape to make some cross supports so this effect wasn't so visible.  On the little parts on the other side of the tracks, I used some foam pieces and masking tape for a base for the plaster cloth pieces.  I'm pretty happy with how all this came out so far.  The cloth is really easy to work with and hardens quickly.  It's not quite as smooth an embankment as I imagined but maybe I'll figure out some way to deal with that.  As for the incline of the road - I tried some putty first on the top and bottom edges but this wouldn't dry.  I removed that and replaced it with spackle.  So far, so good.  The next steps are to whip up some Smooth It plaster for the road surface and sidewalks, and place the bridge support columns.  And finally, the girders for the sides of the bridge.

Lessons learned:

1. Make sure whatever you're putting the plaster cloth on has enough supports on its own, before it dries.
2. Putty won't dry, but spackle will, and you can sand it later.

Underpass

When the heat index is over 100, what better place to be than a cool basement?  After playing with some plaster for making roads a couple weeks ago, I realized if we're going to make streets we're going to have to form the underpass.  In an urban setting these are really common points of contact with trains.  Over a century ago, railroads separated the grades of their track from the city streets when possible for better safety and speed.  I pass under a couple of these every day to and from work, so I want to get this scene right.  I've noticed that the sides of the girder bridges don't tend to be very high; in some cases there's a straight concrete wall along the road, in other cases it's a sloping hill; sometimes the support posts are along the sidewalks, sometimes along the center.  So there are lots of ways to do this. Early on in the planning I decided not to raise the level of the track, because that would interfere with the passing track coming in just off of this.  That meant the road would look like it was dug out after the line was there, rather than the line itself being raised to travel over the streets.  Which meant a deeper bottom and a greater slope to the road.  The first question was, how to make the slope of the road?  Instead of building beneath it, I cut a piece of homasote and attached a hinge to one end underneath.  Then I attached the other end of the hinge under the base, allowing it to naturally fall.  Way overbuilt for what it's going to carry, but it works.  I secured the bottom with construction adhesive.  I'll have to use some putty later to level off where each end meets the base, because those aren't totally flush.  Now I noticed on a nearby underpass like the one I'm modeling that the earthen hill on the sides flares out the deeper the road goes and the closer to the tracks.  So I had to cut out a small angle along each side.  

Next I'm going to attach some cardboard strips to support the embankment on the sides, and then we'll try out that Woodland Scenics plaster cloth.

Playing with plaster

I've never worked with plaster before.  I've read about various ways to create roads and pavement - a styrene sheet, spackling compound, plaster - and after reading some advice in Model Railroader by Pelle Soeborg, I gave plaster a try.  Of course, not on the actual layout yet - rather, on a scrap piece of homasote and an old piece of track.  I started with the Woodland Scenics paving tape - it's a roll of foam tape with a sticky side, useful for blocking out a space.  I used Woodland Scenics' Smooth-It plaster mix for the plaster.  For such a small space, I cut the recipe by 75 percent, so I used 1/2 cup of mix and 1/4 cup of water.  Let sit for a few minutes, then mix for a few minutes, and pour.  It made way more plaster than I needed.  They give you a spreader to level off the space, but it was a little tricky to work with.  I got things as close as I could, and after 15 minutes I ran an old truck along the rails to make sure it wasn't sticking.  That evening I used a screwdriver to carve out along the rails.  The package said to give it 24 hours to set, so today it was pretty solid.  The surface wasn't as flat as I planned but it's easy to sand.  It's also easy to scrape away material from along the rails.  I don't know if that affects the conductivity of the rails but I think it won't (these are sidings anyway).  Woodland Scenics makes a concrete color and an asphalt color paint for these, so that would be the next step.  But this little experiment answered a lot of questions for me.

Lessons learned:

1. I didn't need nearly as much plaster as I thought to fill that small space. 
2. Soeborg used some putty to fill in the gaps between the ties.  I see why he did that - the plaster settles in there and still shows them through the 'pavement'. 
3. I don't have to be too accurate with making sure the wet plaster is level, because sanding it was pretty easy.
4. I was concerned that the wet plaster might not work well with the homasote surface.  But I didn't see any issues with that.

Photo backdrops

I acquired three steel mill-related photo backdrop pieces this spring.  The first step was to cut the image out of the sky - the blue color on there was different from the backdrop I'd already painted.  Next, weeks of just leaving them sitting there, thinking and pondering where to place them.  I had to raise them a little, first to show behind the high line track and secondly to show enough behind where I'll tentatively place the coke ovens.  I used a 3M spray on adhesive, which worked pretty well.  It was tacky enough that it would stick but not so much it got messy.  Finally placing these was more of a mental leap than anything else - glue is pretty final.  Eventually I'll place some trees or shrubs along the bottom so you won't see anything below the images.  I'm pleased with how these look, however while they're all from the same company, the lighting on each is a little different.

Lessons learned:

1. Spray the backs of these outside, so you don't have to worry about what any overspray is getting on.
2. I used a mix of scissors and an x-acto knife to cut the images out.  The experts on Model Railroader said to use an x-acto knife but after a while it was just easier with scissors. 

Next up - figuring out how to model pavement.  And creating the underpass scene.  I suppose at some point soon I should paint the track and install fascia panels on the sides too. 

Trackwork and wiring

I finished off the trackwork leading to the two industries on the east side of the layout, the brewery complex and the printers.  A few feeder wires soldered on and attached to the track bus and we're good to go.  The only trackwork I can think of that remains is what to do on the west side for the spur along the backdrop.  I have an old Walthers grain elevator that I'll put along there, not sure what else.  Maybe some more silos along the backdrop, maybe some kind of flat steel mill-looking building to fit in with the rest.  I got in a couple more packets of Caboose Industries ground throws so I'll be busy fitting them to the remaining switches.  I obtained another photo backdrop for the steel mill scene so I can finally put that together.  Maybe on to some ballasting and painting of track, we'll see.  Summer tends to get busy though it's just a rumor here when there's snow forecast for tonight.

Lessons learned:

1. When I was advised to glue the track down rather than nail it, I didn't realize how difficult that might make changing anything later.  If you try to pry up that Peco track it just pops the rails out of the ties, it's almost a write-off.  Which is one thing for a $5 piece of flex track, another for a $25 switch.  In hindsight I don't know if I would've glued it all down.
2. I've said it before - it's hard to appreciate how much room you're going to need to fit in all the lead tracks heading towards industries.  I used #6 switches throughout - I wonder if #4 switches would've allowed for more room.  I did notice this as I planned, using printouts of switches to realize where they'd all lead to. 

Ground throws

Since the last post, I had to have some plumbing work done, right above the layout.  Many thanks to Northtowns Remodeling for doing a great job working around the layout.  Hopefully those PVC pipes will not leak again and I am free to proceed forward with this project.

One of the many, many, MANY things I had to learn while constructing the layout was how to move the switches.  I wanted to be better than just moving the actual rails by hand.  Electrical switches looked clunky, and I didn't feel ready to jump into figuring out Tortoise switch machines (nor the added $25 or whatever per switch).  Caboose Industries ground throws looked look a good option.  Affordable, unobtrusive, and widely used.  I bought a couple packages to start, but these were the basic ones without the brand-specific mounting pins.  Rookie mistake.  I bought a set of them with the mounting options (I have Peco switches), and today took the plunge to figure out how to install these.  As you can see in the photos, once you did this once correctly and once incorrectly, you got the hang of it.

Lessons learned:

1. Make sure you're buying the correct ground throws for the brand of switches you have.  Also, I wasn't able to find much useful guidance on installing these online (which was a bit surprising).
2. If your track is on cork roadbed, use another little piece of roadbed to get the ground throw to the right level.  Or if it isn't, they include a little piece that snaps on underneath to bring it level.
3. Hopefully you saved some track nails from trackwork because those are perfect for nailing these in place.
4. Make sure that the placement of the ground throw correctly throws the switch all the way to either side.  I had to disassemble these a few times to get it right.  Otherwise you'll find that it leaves it short of where it's supposed to end up.
5. I'm not exactly sure how I'm going to fit in the ground throws in some tight spaces, but that's a problem for another day.  I installed five of these today, three on the mainline and two in the steel mill area. 

I have also made progress in the industrial area on the other side of the layout by laying the tracks for the brewery and the printing press.  They're mostly wired, but I found out I have a dead spot in there, so I have a little more wiring to do.  I haven't figured out how to arrange the coke ovens and the grain elevator on the other side, which will determine the placement of the track to them.  I picked up some photo backdrops of steel mill buildings at a train show in Boston last month, cut them out and I've been trying various placements for them.  That's for another day and another post.