A quiet moment between services.
Hi all.
My sole purchase from the York show this year was a bag of Green Scene Weathering powders in browns, black and ash grey. I had been mulling over ways of improving the weathering of the track on the layout and also how to achieve the multitude of different colours and shades found at the real location and decided that powders might give slightly more control and flexibility than using paint.
It's something of a bugbear of mine that I see a lot of otherwise superb layouts with beautifully weathered and detailed stock running on beautifully made trackwork, but which is almost entirely uniform in colour, or has ballast so impossibly neat that it must have been placed piece by individual piece.
With Ropley, I wanted to pay as much attention to weathering the track, as I will to the buildings and stock. With this in mind, I spent a little while experimenting with the powders, using the black to represent areas where grease seems to accumulate, notably around the frog & check rail areas of point work, and fish plates on the plain line. I’ve also used a mix of black and brown along the length of the rail to try and give some representation of the brake dust and general dirt that seems to accumulate in this area.
Black powder was also used to represent the fine, ashy ballast around the pointwork which leads to the wheel drop shed. This was ballasted in the normal way, but whilst the Kleer was still damp, the powder was applied on top. The result is quite pleasing, and better than trying to ensure Das doesn’t gunge up the mechanism when you only need ballast up to the sleeper tops.
Overall I’m quite pleased with the results. Hopefully the photos show the results to some extent, although I was only able to grab a few quickly on the iphone.
The ballast around the barry slip has also been treated with the black weather powders for a closer to prototype look.
I know by now you're probably all fed up of seeing this same section of track, but hopefully next time there will have been some further developments with the ash pit area, and the top of the embankment. I also need to make a start on the water tower and finish the carriage and boiler shop, so lots to do!
Cheers all,
Tom.
- 9
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