The realization that it’s only now a couple of weeks until Hickory hit hard, and I am way behind schedule. I promise to post an update on the turntable and engine house very soon.

Re-ballasted Corinna yard

I forgot to mention that I had decided to re-ballast the yard at Corinna. Previously, there had been a lot of greenery growing up between the tracks. After going back and looking at some pictures, I realized that there was very little of that on the Maine railroads. I basically just ballasted over the greenery. It’s still not perfect, but it’s better than it was. At some point, I’ll go back and dirty it up a bit, and I think that will help.

I also promised to show you a little of what’s been happening in the creek. As of now, it’s still a touch milky, and it’s going to need at least one more layer of water poured.

I decided that the rocks I had placed previously were not appropriately colored, so I used a couple of shades of gray acrylic paint to correct that. I also placed some more smaller rocks and some additional greenery.

Newly colored rocks, "rapids," and second water pour.

Today, I moved on to the turntable. I have been considering using tiny Neodymium magnets to align the table with the tracks. But, I was concerned about the accuracy required in placing the magnets. Kevin came up with a great idea — and a new shape magnet — to make it relatively easy!

Most of the magnets we’ve been looking at so far have been tiny flat disks, but Kevin recently received a new, cylindrical magnet.

Magnets used to align turntable bridge with tracks

Magnets are placed in the pit wall, under the center lines of each service track, and under the center line of the bridge track. In this case, the approach track is directly in line with one of the service tracks, so no magnet is needed there.

Kevin’s idea to make the alignment adjustment possible is really simple. We drilled over-sized holes for the magnets, and inserted steel flathead screws. The cylindrical magnets hold to the head, and can be slid around slightly. Once the correct location is found, the holes will be filled with glue.

The magnets hold with enough force to stop the turntable at the appointed spot with authority. In the long run, I’ll be using a motor to drive the turntable, but I think that the magnets will still present enough force to align the tracks.

Parting Shot

I know I promised an updated shot from the creek area, and, even though the water’s still a little murky, it is a lot better. So, here’s another shot of No. 9 crossing the creek:

No. 9, traveling southbound, drifts off the bridge into Corinna

Corinna & Searsport No. 9, with a short freight in tow, edges across the trestle approaching Corinna from the north...

I did a little work on the creek tonight and did a second pour of the water. I probably should have taken this before I poured the water, but … anyway, I’ll take a new shot of this on Saturday morning.

Oh, yeah, I guess I ought to mention that the water product worked correctly this time — it was nice and clear when I went downstairs this evening!

I’m just about ready to move on to the turntable, engine house a coal shed.

Creek bed painted with Behr Premium "Fedora" paint.

I actually started work in Corinna late in the afternoon, because I wanted the first batch of color to be dry in time to start working with whomever came over. The first step was to paint the base coat on the creek bed. As usual for the base color, I chose the Behr Premium “Fedora” wall paint, and brush it on liberally. To urge the paint to dry a little more quickly, I used a fan, which worked perfectly. By the time Kevin arrived, the paint was completely dry!

Now that the base color was in place, I got out my reference photos and turned on my memory to start to work on the “look” for the water in this scene. One thing about the water in Maine that is striking is that it’s usually very clear. And, the bottoms of most ponds and streams like this have a kind of distinctive rockiness that needed to be captured.

I thought that one way to do this might be to use some “crackle” paint. Crackle paint is a thick, clear, gel-like substance that you paint over a base coat and allow it to partially dry. Then, you paint the still tacky surface carefully with a color that contrasts your base color. The thicker your coating of crackle paint, the larger your splits will be, so I applied a thin coat to the areas near the shoreline, and coming into the creek about 1/3 of the way on each side.

Bits of "Pot Topper" planted at the base of the spillway retaining wall

While waiting for the crackle paint to dry, I started setting in some of the additional flora that would be growing near the base of the spillway. I decided to try another experiment here, this time using bits of “Pot Topper” material to represent the vibrant plant life that often grows near creek beds. I had seen magazine articles about this material, but I was still skeptical until I saw it on the layout. The stuff looks perfect, and is a fraction of the cost of the Silflor products. It looks as if you could either use tiny tufts like I did here, or even plant large chunks wherever you need some bright ground cover.

Mixture of "Slate Gray" and "Concrete" paints swirled onto the crinkle paint

By this point, the crackle paint had been drying for the prescribed length of time, so I applied a light coat of some lighter paint — a swirly mix of Woodland Scenics “Slate Gray” and “Concrete” colors. Initially, I wasn’t too happy with the look, so I added some more water and swirled it around a little more. The result looks fairly wrong here, but once the “water” gets poured on, things tend to darken up a little, so I decided to go with it.

Stones and rocks added to the stream bed

I also decided that a few larger rocks were needed in the stream. In this case, there wouldn’t be a lot, but a few definitely were in order. We selected some of the flatter pieces from a bag of aquarium/terrarium decorative stone, and I placed them in the creek, above the bridge.

While all of this was drying, we turned our attention to Kevin’s bridge module. Unfortunately, we didn’t take any pictures, but the effect we wanted there was a typical central Maryland/Pennsylvania creek. These creeks tend to have a sandy bottom with a jumble of rocks and stones.

For the sandy bottom, we used one of my favorite sand/dirt base materials — sanded grout over the Fedora paint. I tend to treat the grout just like any other scenic texture. I spread it over the still wet paint, and then soak it with “wet water,” and then continue to build on top of that. Once I have the look I’m after, I spray on some more wet water, and then saturate the area with diluted matte medium. For me, this is a tried-and-true method that always produces something that looks good.

By this time, lighter color paint on the Corinna creek bed was dry, but the crackling wasn’t happening. I decided to go ahead and pour the water anyway. And, being the glutton for punishment that I am, I decided to try a material that I had previously had very bad luck with: Woodland Scenics Realistic Water.

First pour of the Woodland Scenics Realistic Water

The Realistic Water pours on a milky gray, and eventually dries clear. I know it’s supposed to. I’ve seen it. Of course, that was not my result the first time I used it, and I ended up having to start over. “On hand” sometimes trumps common sense, however.

One interesting thing happened, though — after the water was poured and had been setting up for a while, the crackling started below the surface. The result was looking almost exactly like what I had in mind.

And, as I headed out the door this morning, I went down and too a peek at the creek. So far, it looks as if it will actually dry clear, although there’s been significant shrinkage. After dinner tonight, I’ll do some more work in the area, and then another pour. And, of course, more pictures!

Perkins Produce designed and built be Earl Smallshow, from the December 1974 Model Railroader article.,

Morgan Hill Models have announced their first structure kit, and it’s a classic! Originally designed by Earl Smallshaw, and featured in Model Railroader in December of 1974, Perkins Produce has always been a favorite of mine. When I first saw the announcement for the kit, I thought that I would just pull out my copy of the plans, and scratchbuild the structure when the time came. I mean, even though the original model was not set in New England, to my knowledge, the building simply screams MAINE!

The more I thought about it, the more I thought that the pre-release price looked to be an excellent value. And so, I’ve ordered one of the kits.

My order is not entirely without reservation. The actual kit was designed with input from Bill Banta, the same gentleman who designed the Herbert’s Crossing Freight House I used for the freight shed in Corinna. But, from the description, it seems that steps have been taken in the design of this kit to eliminate the problems I had with that kit.

Perkins Produce structure on the waterfront of Martin Collard's Borodino & Southern RR.

While originally built on the side of a hill, my intention is to use the structure on the waterfront in Searsport, similar to the way that Martin Collard has on his HO scale Borodino & Southern RR. This is a fairly major deviation from my original idea of how Searsport should look. In my mind, Searsport was to be based on Wiscassett. Of course, Searsport is a real town that once had a thriving shipbuilding industry, so depicting a busy waterfront on the layout is not entirely out of line.

Applying the latex paint base coat. For the most part, I use a 1" chip brush for this work, and paint up onto the cork roadbed, just short of hitting the ties.

While the paint was still wet, I started applying texture.

Here, the first layer of texture, Scenic Express "Earth Blend" has been sprinkled unevenly over the still-wet paint.

The earth color is being followed with an application of "Green Adirondack Blend" and "Alpine Blend".

The same treatment was applied around the stone retaining walls near the creek bed.

And here's the view after a layer of the "base" textures have been applied.

Overall view of North Corinna, the trestle, and the creek area. The area has been completely saturated with a mixture of rubbing alcohol and water, followed by diluted matte medium.

A couple of observations are in order. I opened up a new “jar” of the Adirondack Blend today, and found that it is significantly “greener” than the previous one, which caused there to be a bit of a mismatch between the sections. Fortunately, the Alpine Blend is still the same, and I was able to use it to do some blending. Since I need to go back to repair a little bit of the scenery on the other two sections, I’ll be able to spread the brighter color around a little.

And, obviously, I’ve still not done anything with the creek bed yet. When I was working in the railroad room this morning, I was still trying to find out exactly what that’s supposed to look like. Fortunately, I was just able to find some snapshots a hiker took in the region while hiking the Appalachian Trail a couple of years back that will be excellent guides. With a few exceptions, the scenery is actually very much like the scenery here.

Here’s a short video that the True Scene folks have produced that describes the product and shows it in use:

There are a couple of interesting properties of True Scene that I’m really curious about — specifically, the ability to re-shape or re-use it after it’s dried. I’ve not tried that with Cell-u-Clay, but will try it with a small hunk when I get back down to the basement on Sunday.

If any of you have used the True Scene products, I’d love to hear about your experiences. You can leave a comment here on this post, of if you’re not comfortable with that, you can use the Contact page to send me a note.

Guess what? Diluted matte medium and shop rags over cardboard do the same thing!

Paper towel/matte medium after setting up for 24 hours.

That was a pretty pleasant surprise, because it meant that a lot less “shaping” was going to be needed. So, in I dove, and mixed up the first batch of Cell-u-Clay to the consistency of cookie dough and started slathering it on the layout.

First section of Cell-u-Clay slathered over the paper towel thin-shell

North Corinna area with all the Cell-u-Clay in place

Base level of scenery complete, and trestle bents installed.

Some of you may have noticed the slight tactical error on my part… Yes, the trestle bents are glued in place, and the creek bed is still bare plywood. That would be classified as an “oops”, but not really that big a deal. I’ll just pour some of the dark green/brown/whatever color (it’s called “Fedora”) and let it run naturally around the bents.

I should mention here that I’ve been using this Cell-u-Clay stuff for most of my life. The first time I used it, I was four or five, and my mother and I used it to make Christmas ornaments. We mixed to cookie-dough-consistency, rolled it out, and used real cookie cutters to shape the ornaments. After they dried — hard as a rock, I might add — we painted them with acrylic paints. For those used to Hydrocal or other plasters, Cell-u-Clay is a different beast. It has a much longer setting time, and generally shouldn’t be applied in layers more than about 3/8″ thick, or it may never completely harden. Also, if you have issues with the dust from Homasote, Cell-u-Clay is absolutely not for you. It’s basically Homasote dust in a bag.

I’ll be letting this set up for a couple of days while I work on some other, non-railroad-related items. I’ll be back at it on Sunday…

First layer of scenic forms in north Corinna

The first layer of landforms have been applied over the cardboard forms. Made from heavy duty workshop paper towels soaked in diluted matte medium, they obviously show almost every former beneath them. Not to worry — this shell only exists to support a thicker layer of something-or-another. In my case, that something-or-another will be Cell-U-Clay. Cell-U-Clay is cheap and lightweight, and easy to work with. It will be used to smooth out the “ribs” and be the actual base of the scenic coloring and texture — kind of like topsoil over fill dirt.

Overhead view showing the area "north" of Corinna showing much of the new stonework, the bridge, and the scenic forms.

Figuring out how to deal with the south end of the bridge (left in the above picture) still left a big question about how to handle what would be a very narrow creek flowing in from the north. The space is very narrow because of the decision to make the “end” of the layout match the modules, and I was left with an improbable scenic situation. The answer came in the form of adding another mill that will eventually wrap around the corner into the back area of the basement. A mill needs a dam and a spillway. In my world, the dam will be out in the aisle, with the track running between the resulting lake and the spillway. The mill itself will be across the spillway from the railroad main line.

Stone work begins for the newly added spillway.

With that decision made, it became obvious that more stonework would be required. Between taking the picture at left and writing this post, I added a couple of scenery forms at the end of the layout section, and added some base coloring to the stonework and the spillway.

For the landforms, I decided to go “traditional” — thin-shell plaster over formers. Where I’ll be deviating from the old-school techniques will be in some of the materials. I still need to keep the weight reasonable since Corinna still has to make two more public appearances.

Chip-card forms and webbing waiting for the thin-shell covering.

In this instance, the formers will be thin chip-cardboard, and the thin-shell will be a layer of plaster cloth. Over the plaster cloth, I’ll apply a layer of cell-u-clay. Cell-u-clay is a paper mache product that is fairly lightweight, but handles a lot like plaster, except that it’s a little stickier.

Tomorrow, the plan is to start applying the thin-shell and cell-u-clay and finally install the trestle bents — they’ve still not be permanently attached.

Note: There are a lot of images in this post, so the images on this page are pretty small. Clicking on them will open them in large-sized viewer.

Late yesterday, it finally came to me — I’d build a partial retaining wall from locally quarried stone. With a selection of both rigid and flexible stone wall on hand, I set to work. The area that’s shown at right will have a bank sloping down from the bottom of wall to the creek.

Of course, at the ends of the trestle, the rock-work will go all the way down to the creek bed level. But, before the abutments could be placed, the roadbed had to be cut away. To do that, I used a hacksaw blade, cutting up from the bottom until I reached the bottom of the ties. Once the roadbed was gone, there was plenty of room to finish the stone-work.

With most of the stone retaining walls and abutments in place, I started on to the trestle itself. To prepare, I removed the plastic pieces between the ties, so that there would be room to slide the rest of the bridge ties into place. One note here. Pictures of many of the trestles on the Maine two-footers show that the bridge ties look to be the same as regular ties, simply placed closer together.

To built the trestle, I started with two curved stringers aligned beneath the rails. To make installation a little easier, I pre-curved them while they were still slightly damp from being stained. I waited until the stain was pretty much dry, and then spread a very thin layer of clear Elmer’s glue along the top edge. The curved pieces were then inserted into notches that had been previously cut into the top of the abutments, moved into position and clamped. While the glue was still wet, the extra ties were slid into place between the molded plastic ties.

I’m now working on the trestle bents which, like the prototype, are of a very simple design — three pilings beneath a single support, with a pair of diagonals to provide some rigidity. There will be nine of these bents on the bridge, spaced approximately every eight scale feet. Once all the bents are in place, there will be additional diagonal braces set between each bent.

The result will be a trestle similar to this one on the Bridgeton & Saco River.

By the way, you may have noticed the “clothespin” clamps in a couple of the pictures. And, you may have thought, “I thought this was an O-scale layout. Either those clothespins are really small, or that’s one helluva big trestle!” Well, you’d be right — they’re half-size clothespins! I’ve been searching for small clamps for several months now, and couldn’t find anything that satisfied me, until now. The coin is a U.S. Quarter, so you get an idea of the size. They’ve got a decent grip, but aren’t so strong as to crush basswood or balsa parts.

The Freight House at Corinna

With the exception of details, the Corinna freight house has been completed. I used the Banta Modelworks “Herbert’s Crossing” kit for this structure, for two reasons: 1) it was on hand and (2) it’s a fairly typical structure that fits the Maine prototypes well.

Description

The Banta kit is what I’d call an “old school” laser kit — a mixture of old and new techniques and materials. Since it’s been a while since I’ve built a kit like this, I spent some time reading through the instructions. And then, I read them again, because, honestly, they are not written very well at all. Since this is a relatively simple kit — one that should be good for beginners — I would have expected that each step would be well detailed. Unfortunately, this was not the case. Entire steps were missing, or were very inaccurate. At least one step and the parts diagram reference tabs and slots that don’t exist in the kit.

The kit instructions ramble on about painting/staining prior to construction. My experience with this has not been good no matter what kind of paints I’ve tried, so I opted to wait and paint each sub-assembly as I completed it.

The Build

I knew that I was going to have to modify the kit so that the loading platform would be at the correct height for my narrow gauge trains. This required figuring out the freight car deck height, and then figuring out how long to make the posts supporting the platform and structure. I moved along according to the instructions, which omit the step of joining the two deck sections together — one piece is laser-etched to represent an offset 12″ board pattern on the exterior portion of the platform, while the other is scribed basswood representing 6″ tongue-and-groove interior flooring. While the two pieces are of the same thickness, they are definitely different types of wood — the exterior portion of the deck is of a much higher quality, harder wood than the interior section.

The last step in the process of building the platform calls for ringing the deck with scale 2x8s. There was not enough material in the kit to finish the edge boards. Fortunately, I had extra stock in my scratch-building supply bin.

Once the glue was dry, I stained the platform using dyes from Hunter Line — an application of light brown, creosote black and then medium brown. Within about an hour, the interior section of the platform had warped upward, managing to pull off the glue joints. I re-glued the joints, parked about 10 pounds of lead shot on the deck and moved on to the next part of the structure.

Building up the windows and doors follows modern practice — making and sandwich of 1/64″ peal-and-stick plywood. It’s best to pre-paint these parts, which I did using craft store acrylic paint. While the paint was drying there, I moved on to assembling the walls, which were made from some rather porous, soft scribed material.

Magnetic Gluing Jig

In this case, the wood was pre-warped. Since it’s important to be sure that the walls are square, I used a magnetic clamp base to hold everything in place while the glue set, and I went back to assembling the windows.

With the walls built up, and the windows ready for installation, I moved on to painting the walls. For the exterior, I used a band of dark green on the bottom six “boards” and a light green the rest of the way up. On the interior, I used a neutral gray color. Usually, when both surfaces of a wood are painted with the same or similar paint, they won’t warp.

Warped end wall

I don’t know if the “pre-warped” condition was the cause or not, but in this case, the walls warped considerably, and in multiple directions! By the time I got the camera out, the walls had straightened out and then warped in different directions! The extreme warpage, along with a generally flimsy feeling to the walls prompted me to add structural supports to the interior, using spare materials I had on hand.

Added interior bracing

The resulting box was solid, rigid and square. Note in the photo that the new framing continues across both door openings. This was done to hold the thin section between the doors in line while the paint dried thoroughly.

The roof is made up of two slabs of soft, flat wood with scribed lines intended to be used as guides for the tarpaper roof. Unfortunately, there was no tarpaper material in the kit. Instead, there was a quantity of too-small paper shingles. Additionally, the roof panels are the same size, and there is no provision for the roof halves to overlap, nor is there a provided cap strip — and, there is no mention of how to handle the roof peak in the instructions. I opted to bevel the edges where the roof halves join together, and proceeded to build the roof structure basically according to the instructions.

For the roofing material, I decided to use a product I’m developing for market: printed shingle stock. To affix the heavy paper shingles to the roof structure, I use double-sided carpet tape. This approach avoids warping the structure and wrinkling or bubbling the paper, as occurs when using various glues to hold the paper on. The carpet tape also has a little “give,” so when changes in humidity cause the paper or wood to expand or contract, there’s no warping or bubbling. I hit the outside edges with a brown Sharpie to simulate the edges of the shingles, and stained the underside of the roof with light brown stain. Then, I applied the 2×6 trim strips at the ends as in the instructions, and added strips along the bottom edges as well to match the construction of the passenger station.

Roof underside.

While all this was drying, I installed the doors. After some hemming and hawing, I decided to install the doors in an open position, which meant removing the braces across the doorways. I was pleasantly surprised when the wall didn’t spring into some odd position. Using tape as temporary “hinges,” I glued the doors in place.

Conclusion

With the three major pieces of the kit completed, I can say that the results were worth the effort. However, I would also say that this kit could use some improvement. I am reminded of a kit I built over 15 years ago — one of the first laser kits — whenI was still modeling in HO. The unclear, incorrect and incomplete instructions made the kit more difficult to build than it needed to be. And better quality materials would have reduced the number of additional steps I had to complete. Finally, if I had not had extra material in my shop, I would not have been able to complete the kit as designed. At U$46 for this relatively basic kit, I had expected a better experience, and in the future, I will certainly plan to inspect kits from this manufacturer prior to purchase.

Bridgeton Junction on the Bridgeton & Saco River showing narrow gauge and standard gauge trains

The trick here is to remember that, while On30 trains are in fact O scale, they’re models of much smaller trains than O scale standard gauge trains, and structures like water tanks, coaling facilities, etc., will be proportionally smaller.

The obvious solution is that one should use models of narrow gauge prototypes for water tanks, sand towers, coal towers and the like. A less obvious solution is that some S-scale structures are sized quite nicely to stand in on an On30 layout — especially for Maine two-foot prototypes.

After looking at that dirt roadway for a few days, and comparing it to photographs of dirt roads in Maine, I decided the color just wasn’t right — too bright and too even. So, I set about to make the road look a bit more used.

The first thing I did was to use some light gray weathering stain to streak the roadway where tire tracks would be. I also dry-brushed the stain over the entire road surface. After that I used light brown weathering stain to darken the color of the entire roadway. I also use both stains to help blend the road into the surrounding scenery.

I really like the toned-down look of the road, so I’ll probably go back to my old yard modules, and apply the same effect to the roads there.

I also headed down to Kevin’s with the “north” end of Corinna, and we did all the prep work for the turntable.

Most of the Maine-two-foot turntable pits I have pictures of seem to be relatively shallow, and there’s no consistency to how the pit walls are lined. This pit is only 3-scale-feet deep and, since there are quarries near Corinna (in my world), I’ll be using a cut stone pit wall.

Finally, I published the wrong picture of the final stain color for the passenger platform. As I mentioned, the platform didn’t look brown enough to me, so I added a wash of barn red weathering stain to bring the browns forward a little. The correct picture is shown at left.

Roadwork

Step one: Paint. I’ve used a thick paint (the Behr stuff from Home Depot that has a primer and paint in one). This stuff is like painting with glue, and I lay it on really thick.

Step two: Add texture. I use dry pre-colored sanded grout. I’m not going to tell you the color, because everyone perceives color a little differently, and because the color of dirt in the area you’re modeling will vary. Go with your eye on this. You’ll find the sanded grout in the aisle with the ceramic tile supplies at your local home improvement store.

Don’t worry at this point about it being “pretty.” Just get it on there, and make sure the whole roadway is covered. It will get smoothed out some in the next step.

Note that I said I use this stuff dry, just like putting on any other scenery texture. I know other folks who mix it with water, and apply it with a putty knife and/or spatula. I’ve never tried this … yet.

Step three: Smooth. Using a very soft brush, gently smooth and shape the road surface. I try to make most of my brush strokes go in the direction of travel. Try not to move so much of the grout around that you expose the sub-road. If you do, just push some of the grout back. Also, this is a dirt road, so don’t make the surface perfect. It should have small rough spots, holes and undulations.

By the way, for nice soft brushes, I get makeup brushes at the grocery store or Walmart.

Step four: There’s not enough moisture in the paint to completely secure the grout. To permanently fix the grout to the layout, I use the same technique as for ballasting track: using a mister, I saturate the grout with “wet water” and then come back with another mister of diluted matte medium.

For wet water, I have the best luck with an alcohol/water mix — about a 1:3 mix of 70% isopropyl alcohol and tap water. For matte medium, Scenic Express has absolutely the best product. I get their premixed in gallon jugs. I lay this on pretty heavy, too — enough so that the scenery turns a milky white. If I’ve put enough wet water on first, the matte medium will soak completely into the scenic material and once dry, it completely disappears. And, my scenery stays on the layout!

Working with Stains

I mentioned yesterday that I was working on the coloring of the passenger platform. I had used a base color, mixing two shades of gray/brown (“Bittersweet Chocolate” and Raw Umber), then sorta dry-brushed Driftwood stain over that, and then planned to wash that with a medium-brown weathering stain. The result was not quite brown enough for my taste, so this morning I added a wash of barn red stain.

I also used cottage white stain to tone down the light green, flowing it carefully into the green paint. I also dry-brushed the same stain onto the dark green areas and the roof.

Planting a Building

There’s a small shed/office adjacent the yard that straddles the joint between the two sections of the Corinna benchwork, so it will need to be removable, yet it still needs to look as if it’s permanently installed. The shed also needed to be raised up to track level.

I started that process by scraping the temporary scenery away from the area that the building would occupy, and used some cork roadbed to build up the terrain in that area.

My next step was to remove the pins holding the cork in place, and apply a liberal coat of my base color paint. While this was still wet, I placed the shed carefully, and sprinkled a layer of ballast trackside, and placed “dirt” and greenery around the sides and rear of the building. Then, I sprayed the area with wet water, followed by the diluted matte medium. The result is a removable building that looks as if the scenery grew up around it.

Pleasant Street Antique Postcard

I’m also thinking about making the bulk of the town of Corinna in the aisle, and maybe buy the image above to use where the road on the layout hits the backdrop.

Grist Mill Antique Postcard

The grist mill is particularly interesting, as the next part of the layout to be built will be the mill just to the “south” of Corinna. I was planning to use the MTH Granary building as the basis for my mill. From this picture, it appears as if that will be a good starting point.

Roadwork in Corinna

Here’s a look at the road coming into Corinna. The roads are built up on cork, painted with thick mud-colored paint, and layered with sanded grout. The grade crossings are, believe it or not, coffee stirrers painted using craft-store paints.

The section near the wall has yet to be contoured. I want to bring the level of the road down to the “base” level.

Passenger and freight platforms

The passenger platform, seen at right, is also made of coffee stirrers, glued to a slab of 1/4″ birch plywood. The platform is notched so that the platform is flush with the station floor — the Corinna & Searsport is safety conscious. We don’t want any passengers tripping and falling on their way to see the ticket agent!

Corinna station platform after paint

As with everything else, coloring the platform is a multi-stage process. Under that gray, there are two shades of dark gray/brown streaked together. The gray color is heavily dry-brushed “driftwood” stain, applied while the brown colors are still tacky. Once all of this is dry, a wash of medium brown weathering stain will be applied.

Paints and driftwood stai

Herbert's Crossing

Finally, the freight house will be the Banta “Herbert’s Crossing Freight House.” It will not be painted the incredible red color on the package. Instead, it will be painted to match the station… Of course.

No. 10 idles in front of the Corinna freight house on an overcase morning.

Another four feet of basic scenery done. It’s amazing how much more quickly things go once you’ve collected up all the tools and supplies you need…

Since we’ve got a show coming up in a scant 10 days (!), and I had a day off today, I started to get busy on basic scenery. Of course, it’s now 4:30, and I’ve only managed about 4 feet of scenery.

What you see here is a layer of green/brown latex paint with a heavy sprinkling of Scenic Express “Green Alpine Blend” and “Pasture Green” flock and turf. The ballast is also from Scenic Express. It’s all held in place with Scenic Express pre-diluted matte medium.

I also received a box today from the Train Troll, containing the aforementioned boxcar and flatcar kits, along with a set of WW&F crossing signs. While it will be a short while before I start building these, I can say that the kits are beautifully cut and the instructions look excellent.

• I really don’t like working with foam for scenic forms. I’m going back to nice, easy, conventional scenery techniques.
• After the trip to Hickory in September, I’ll go back to carrying one of the “standard” module sets.
• The rest of the layout will be built using more “conventional” construction. It’s not going “on tour,” so why bother with light- or medium-weight modular construction when “chunks” will do.

Why fly in the face of the “new order” in scenery and go away from foam? Basically, there are a couple of ways to shape foam — hacking and grinding, or hot-cutting. Hacking and grinding is messy, and hot-cutting will kill you.

And, there are 24 feet of unused module just hanging around, doing nothing except taking up space.

Anyway, I’m feeling woozy from the foam fumes, and it’s past my bedtime. More later, when I can form a more coherent thought.

Beach House by Jack Germsheid

I need to make a reason to build a model of this. It’s just too cool. Of course, it doesn’t match the theme of anything I model.

See the original image, and more photography by Jack Germsheid by clicking here.

At Peach Creek, I picked up two pair of Pilz/Tillig HOn30 switches and a few pieces of HOn30 flex track. I also had a good chance to look at Bachmann’s scenic items — particularly their line of trees. For smaller scales (HO included), they’ve got some really nice, affordable boxes of trees. I’ll certainly be using them on the HOn30 layout(s), and likely some will find their way to the On30 as well.

Tillig HOn30 Turnout (Bottom)

Tillig HOn30 Turnout (Top)

Back to the track. The Pilz/Tillig turnouts are really quite nice, and have a couple of unique features, the most notable being that they are flexible. Yes, you read that right. While they have a nominal 14″ radius diverging route, the entire turnout can be bent to create a curved turnout or a wye. A close look at the picture of the bottom of the turnout shows how that works.

Tillig have also seen fit to pre-install a solder tab so that the frog can be easily wired, and they include a pair of insulated rail joiners, a pair of regular rail joiners and a couple of extra solder tabs. Nifty.

There is a drawback to these turnouts over the Peco — some sort of switch throw is mandatory. While the Peco have an integrated hold-over spring, the Tillig’s have none. And, with the point rails being continuous into the frog, they tend to want to stay centered. That said, I do have a large quantity of micro-slide switches that I think I can attach to the bottom of the turnout. That would allow holding the points appropriately, and also be able to be used to route the power to the frogs.

Bachmann 32008-1 Elm Trees

The picture above shows one of the many types of Bachmann trees (they have almost 40 varieties/sizes). They really look better in person than they do in this picture, and will make excellent foreground HOn30 trees (and very good mid-ground On30 trees). They tend to be under $7 a box (typically three trees) at either Peach Creek or Moose Caboose. (For “background” trees on the HOn30, Scenic Express “Super Trees” will also be used — they’re really economical!).

I also stopped by The Moose Caboose to pick up a box of cork roadbed and see what other trouble I could get in to. Glenn did a good job, though, of keeping me in line (I think Donna must have called ahead!), though I did look around the shop to see what interesting HO stuff was there. Woodland Scenics have some beautiful built-ups, although they’re really expensive.

At JoAnne’s, I picked up a couple of rolls of moss ribbon. I have no idea what this stuff is intended for, but it looks like it’s going to be fantastic for making vines and ivy. From there, I moved on to Michaels, where I picked up about a half-dozen different kinds of floral wire (for tree-making) and some really tiny tools. Also, for tree-making, I picked up some masking tape and a couple of gray and brownish spray paints from Lowes.

All that was just about a hundred miles on Donna’s car. Can’t wait to get mine back from the shop!

Second up, I’ve looking at some stuff for bashing HOn30 locos. A fellow I’ve corresponded with in the past (Tom Bell) has designed several HOn30 items, which can be purchased through Shapeways. Here’s a link to Tom’s designs: http://www.shapeways.com/shops/tebee

Finally, Dallas Mallerich just posted this link on facebook: http://www.009.cd2.com/members/how_to/nouaillier_a.htm

For years, I’ve seen the Model Maker software by Evans Design advertised in various model railroad magazines, but had been reluctant to try it. Last month, however, it was given high marks by a member of our monthly crew at Steve Fisher’s layout. I downloaded the demo building and printed it out, and was generally impressed. Nice. And, I’ve been thinking about the astounding work that Troels Kirk does with paper. His recent posting of a photo of a building he’s started using printed brick paper was the clincher, and I bought and downloaded the software today.

Model Maker is a piece of software that allows you to “build” structures on your computer, and print them out on a color inkjet printer. In short, the quality of some of the textures is quite good, even when using a basic office-level inkjet printer on run-of-the-mill copier paper. Of course, best results will be obtained with a photo-quality printer on matte-surface photo paper. The quality will be better-than-average for background buildings right out of the printer, and with a little tweaking and using layered building and printing, the structures should be good enough to use anywhere on the layout.

There are, of course, a few limitations. The palette of masonry and siding construction materials is not extensive, and, with the exception of the “brick designer”, the “siding designer” and a single “plug-in pack” called The Brickyard, there is no way to add additional textures. That said, the included textures (and those in The Brickyard) are quite good.

There is a small selection of doors and windows, and here’s where I think the program could use some improvement — it would be really nice to be able to colorize the included details. That said, you can import your own images for doors, windows and the like. My thought is to use a drawing program to design and colorize my own and / or photograph commercial castings or prototype features and colorize them for my own use.

Those so inclined can check out the five-minute-test drawings I did this afternoon, and the test of a sheet from The Brickyard.

Model Builder Test
The Brickyard

Of course, these are all done in O-scale — which brings up another interesting feature of the software. Let’s say that you’re like me and that you model in On30. But your buddy down the block has an HO empire in his basement. He sees one of the structures you build using Model Builder, and he comments that one would look really neat on his layout. No problem. Simply launch Model Builder and specify HO scale for this session. Then, open the file for your O-scale model. Answer one simple question and you’re ready to print out a “kit” for your friend.

Model Builder is available from Evan Designs, as either a download or on CD. The CD version is U$45, and you can add The Brickyard for U$10. Or, you may opt to download the files directly and save a few dollars. Evan Designs also offer several other software packages, printing supplies and an array of LED products specifically suited to model railroading.