Sunday, January 23, 2011

Running the Boston & Maine GP-9 Lashup just for fun

Finished Mountain...for now...

Applied fine green and coarse green turf, clump foliage, trees, and blended all with burnt grass fine turf. Put medium dirt at bottom of cliff, put medium and coarse talus, and flyspecked fine soil turf onto cliff and rock faces. Put on tunnel portals, and pulled up masking tape. Had to run some trains after all this!










Saturday, January 22, 2011

Rock outcroppings and basecoat

Spray-painted inside of tunnel, casted and attached rock outcroppings, stained rocks and flyspecking with fine soil turf, painted mountain with earthcoat pigment, sealed all with scenic cement







Monday, January 17, 2011

Started Mountain Construction, Misc pics

This is 100% Woodland Scenics technique. Foam profile boards and foam sheet goods hot glued. Pillow shaped newspaper wads stacked and taped, covered with plaster cloth and smoothed with an old brush.

Next come rock outcroppings, staining/painting, and turf/ground cover.

The control panel is a re-work of my original panel from 10+ years ago. The original was done by sandwiching the layout printed on acid-free paper between 2 sheets of plexiglass. I then had to drill over (50) ¼"-inch holes in the 2 sheets of plexi using a glass cutting bit in a drill press. Took forever, and was very touchy.

This last time, I used the same box and much of the same wiring, but this time I printed the track plan out of RR-Track to a PDF file. I think imported this into a free Adobe Illustrator clone vector drawing program and placed the PDF file in the background and traced it as a vector file. I think thickened up the lines and colored them, and printed this out on a color piece of paper. I took this to Staples and had them laminate it. I then took a 1/8" piece of masonite board and cut to the size of the box and used Super 77 adhesive to adhere the laminated sheet to the masonite. Now I carefully drilled right through the paper and board for the switches. It took much less effort and time than the original. I drilled all the holes in this one in about 20 minutes instead of days!

This all being said, my next layout will probably be DCS with AIU's to control the switches and I probably won't have a control panel.









Friday, January 14, 2011

Saturday, January 8, 2011

Tabletop Mount of Tortoise Switch Machine

Benchwork framing directly under turnout throwbar, so had to get creative...