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.