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.