As promised, more progress on the railroad today. The Cell-u-Clay was almost completely dried, and so I slathered on a quite gloppy coat of Behr Premium “Fedora” flat latex paint, and proceeded to layer on the texture.

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.

Remember when you were a kid, and you made those rubber-band-powered model airplanes? The first time you spent hours covering those spindly balsa-wood wings with tissue or silk and “dope,” weren’t you convinced that floppy, droopy thing would never fly? And, a few hours later, you saw that wing or fuselage with nice, tight, smooth contours, and you thought, “Wow! This is great!”

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…

Not a lot was accomplished on the railroad today, with the exception of some spirited discussion about turntable construction and how “water” will get out of the spillway, the only other thing to get done was the first layer of “landform” was applied.

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.

Most of today was spent on the layout, completing the stonework at the north end of the bridge and placing forms for the scenery.

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.