Update: October 29th, 2013

Taking a break from the trains as we catch up on the other things that life throws at us.  Here is the layout as it stands right now.  We'll probably do some small work this winter but our time will be taken up with other things.  Don't worry, we'll be back to it soon enough!  :)

Mina County has a covered bridge!!!!!

Continuing work...coming along great.  Here are some photos that detail the highlights:

This is a bridge I've been working on, laser-cut wood, assembled with Elmer's all-purpose glue put on thin with a brush.  Two weeks of work and it's finally done but for the weathering.

A little pond at the bottom of rock outcroppings along the track.  Not entirely done yet.

A collapsed building between the tracks before Jasper Rock (what I've been calling that monolith in my mind).  I rebuilt Jasper Rock, coated it with gypsum, added hydrocal molded rocks and painted it.

My dad built this building out of paper!!!!  Looks pretty damned great!

The river, after a final coat of blue-tinted varnish. I still want to add some more rocks.

This was a couple of blocks of 2" pink foam.  I carved the strata using a hot wire carver, coated it in gypsum and painted it.  No rock molds were used to make this at all.

This stone retaining wall was made from a thin sheet of foam, cut with shallow cuts with a hot knife and painted with three different colors of acrylic only partially mixed together.  The cliffs here were done the same way the ones above were.

August 18th, 2013: Cliffs and Trees

So now I am carving the cliff faces directly into the foam and have made a large amount of hydrocal rock molds.  Father is continuing to lay out ground texture and building trees.  The whole thing is coming along nicely.  Enjoy the video!

Major Progress (July 24th, 2013)

I was away chasing storms and came back to find some areas of the layout transformed.  A new village, most of the trackage ballasted and some amazing terrain put in.  I finished working on the river, painting earth tones onto the upper layer and then pouring the top layer.  I thought I had sealed the ends of the river but it turned out not to be so.  Fortunately, Minwax Polyacrylic (which we are using for the river) is water-soluble, which is why I bought it to begin with.  New cliffs have been carved and covered with gypsum, new houses and trees have been constructed and even the roughing out of the road leading from the manufacturing area to the village with a set of switchbacks to the lower town has been constructed.  Things are coming along very nicely!

Amazing Progress!!!!

So, after a month of working we have made some serious changes.  Painting on cliffs, putting on Fusion Fiber and texturing...and today I painted the river!  Check it out in the video here:

Full Speed Ahead!!!!

GoDaddy finally got the release from my old provider and www.markrosengarten.com is back in business, baby!!!!!  I just got the links pages up for the topic-by-topic links to the relevant YouTube videos back.

Mark Rosengarten (dot com?)

Blogger.com is not seeing my YouTube videos for this account.  Until the problem is resolved, here is the link to the video:

Link to video

Building a mountain!

Saturday's build time had me making a mountain.  Tomorrow I paint it!  We've been having difficulties...Digitrax lied to us about a warranty return and exchange, so we're still without the booster and the trains we ordered that were supposed to come with DCC decoders didn't.  We are at a very frustrating point in the build but we'll hopefully be past it soon.