Build Update: January 11th, 2014

Work is progressing nicely on the layout.  We are creating a swamp and we tore out the switchback area coming off the mountain and turned it into a straight road, widening it by 3/4".  Took a bit of engineering to do it but it looks good.  More work is being done on the industrial area and it is really taking shape!

12/15/13 Video!!!

Updated Photos!!!!

The cliffs are made from carved pink insulation foam, covered with gypsum and painted. I used a hot knife to carve the foam. The retaining wall is Woodland Scenics Concrete paint put directly onto foam. The vertical grooves in the retaining wall were made with pencil. My dad made all of the trees using premade trunks and branches and slowly adding the texturing over a period of several days. The ground cover is Fusion Fiber with Woodland Scenics ground texturing applied.

Retaining wall is made of 1/4" thick piece of foam that I carved grooves into with a pen and then painted, then my dad added the greenery. The cliffs are made from carved pink foam insulation and covered with gypsum and painted.

Built this graveyard over the course of the last week. My dad did all of the ground cover this week.

Houses from over a hill in the foreground.

Houses from over Jasper Rock.

This portal was made with 1/4" foam with each rock outline carved with a very sharp pencil and then painted...each rock in the portal is painted individually. We still have a lot of work to do in this area. 

Getting back to the track

Although I still can not put in the four to six hours a day I was doing, it's back to work.  During the last four weeks I have made 58 trees, including four new apricot trees for the orchard (to be planted in the spring).  Also completed: the west side retaining wall and cliffs now have vegetation and the tracks both above and below this area are ballasted with scenery and trees.

This week, Mark and I put in the cemetery and I am almost finished landscaping it, and the nearby pond.  The tombstones are tiny, but by adding dirt to highlight each, they can be seen.

Next week we'll add another batch of fusion fiber to smooth out the hills.  I find that doing the scenery while the fusion fiber is initially moist works far better than coming back afterwards.  It takes more time, but the results are worth it.

Slightly inactive.

During September, I was concentrating on making trees and shrubs, off the layout, for future use, as well as defining the ballast and scenery around the edges of the layout.  At this point I'd estimate the rough scenery away from the town is 25% complete.

Unfortunately, in early October a routine medical procedure turned critical and I landed in the hospital for a week, having a procedure I never expected to need.  Recovery time is estimated at eight weeks or longer, but hopefully I should be able to continue working on simple scenery projects by mid-November, and be back to full activity by early 2014.

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.