Br. 85 zwischen Falkensteig und Hirschprung by Will Vale, on Flickr

Br.85 no. 85005 brings a short train down towards Freiburg some time in the early '50s. It's nice to see a bit of steam power on the line, especially when it's such an attractive loco.

This weekend I managed to spend a fair bit of time working on the layout. The landscape around the left-hand end has been built up to about the right height, and I've been carving away at the rock faces. This is an interesting pass-time - it's fun but I worry that (my) carving doesn't capture detail at a high enough frequency to look like the real thing. It's also really easy to leave 'tells' as to what the scenery is made from - the usual suspects with Styrofoam rocks are knife marks, cracks which don't go anywhere or make sense, and slivers of Styrofoam which stick out and give away that the material is really light.

After the initial carving I painted a coat of terrain goo (gesso, raw umber paint, and a couple of pinches of fine sand) over the whole landscape. The sand is great at giving the surface grip, which helps when applying scatter later. The problem is that (as I realised when looking at the results) in Z scale at least, it doesn't look right on vertical rock faces. My fix for this was to apply DAS clay in a thin layer over the worst bits of the rock face, and then impress more rock-like detail in this with the old standby of crumpled-up tin foil. After the clay dried I sealed it with dilute PVA (like the tunnel mouths) and another coat of painty gesso.

The sand helps anchor the clay, so all is not lost! The later rocks I've remembered to undercoat without the pinch of sand.

The right hand end of the layout has also tarted up with brown goo, and I've started building a big tower of Styrofoam slices to make the basis of the Hirschsprung rock formations.

It's starting to look more interesting, but I think there's still more detail needed on the rocks. Possibly when some greenery and small rocks are added it'll balance out? The next step (apart from the landforms at the right hand side) is maybe to paint up a bit of rock face and see how it looks.

At the bottom I've started adding the pavement to the roads with 5x0.5mm styrene strip. It curves just enough to go around the gentle bends, but I'm going to have to cut out some curves by hand (yuck) to fit the sharper bends.

And finally (as John Craven would say) I discovered a new peril when working in the smaller scales: The 4-wheel open you see in some of these images is hanging around the layout for track testing, and was parked in a tunnel while I was working on the scenics. I went to hoover some styrofoam particles off the track near the tunnel mouth, and before I could react the wagon was sucked out of the tunnel and rattling down the hoover pipe Luckily I recovered it, and it was none the worse for wear when dusted off