March 12th, 2014: Aaaaaand...A Swamp!

Of of the things we had seen in train show layouts that we knew we wanted to incorporate into our layout was a swamp.  This one is loosely based on the many little pocket swamps we have here in the Hudson Valley, that feature grass, cattails, dead trees and willows.

This photo showcases the trestle that was built about a year ago, since covered with a hand-carved and painted foam overlay to show bricks.  There is the beginning of a pond but it's not really visible in this shot as it needs more "water" (acrylic lacquer) put over it.  Along the left edge of this pond are purple loostrife, cattails, grass and a willow tree.

This shot details the small pool of water on the top of the cliffs in a depression, the drainage of which down the cliff forms the swamp below.  This area started out as an experiment using polyurethane spray foam which didn't work out so well, it was covered by spackle, which cracked so I removed it and then covered it with hydrocal and then eventually gypsum, which has been our rock medium of choice,.  Vegetation has been added.

Work continues on the road from the factory down to the town over the track portals.  The next stage is finishing carving the cliffs and painting with gypsum and then painting the whole thing in Woodland Scenics acrylics, putting down the road, painting that and then putting the portal facade up (which has already been carved and painted).  This has been a particularly challenging area, requiring serious engineering.  On top of the cliffs is our trusty battery-powered vacuum cleaner, which has worked out quite well in keeping loose particulates down.

And THIS is the swamp. Putting the tracks and levels and cliffs in around this area was one of our greatest challenges, requiring quite a bit of imagination to get just right.  Finishing this area is a huge milestone in the progress of our layout.  

So, where do we go from here?  Well, as the weather warms up, I will finally be able to take our buildings outside and spray them with clear acrylic primer and start painting them, which will take a long time.  We have the town's main street roughed out and that will be a project for this summer.  In addition, we have to rough out the main mountain on the northwest side of the layout and build some bridges to cross our stream.  We've also been having circuit issues, with a few of our wires breaking free of the spatula connectors to the junction boxes and an odd short-circuit in the system that involves the bleed-through of the current from Tracks 1 and 2 to the rest of the layout, which wasn't happening before.  We have also had some rough spots in Track 1 where the train becomes derailed, one of them on the south side of the layout by a double switch.  We have a lot of work ahead of us but it's really fantastic to just step back and look at the layout as a whole and see how much we have already accomplished.