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.