Will Vale

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

Smoothing the hills by Will Vale, on Flickr The next step after the foam carving and sticking is filling in all the rubbish bits. I tend to stuff the cracks with offcuts to save on filler, and then spread a coat of "lightweight spackle" over the landforms. I think this is made with tiny glass bubbles in an acrylic carrier. It's really really light, flexible, and clean to use - if you drop some on finished scenery it won't stick - you have to spread it onto surfaces before it grips. And this feature also works on carpet The tub warns not to use it on plastic, but I haven't had problems with it eating the foam. It looks a bit ghastly to start with: but if you wait for an hour or two for it to start to skin over you can stipple it with an old brush to knock down the ridges left by the knife. This also gives a bit of basic texture and helps bed the filler in around rocks and such. It needs a gentle touch if the filler's been applied thickly, since it won't be solid under the surface. With that out of the way I thought I'd have a go at carving the rocks above the Falkenstein tunnel. It's starting to look OK although I think it should really be set back a little more than it is from the tunnel mouth. I'm not sure I think that so strongly that I'm going to slice it all off and start again though The toothpicks are holding some added-on bits of foam in place to fill in some gaps in the rock face. I'm not sure if I'm going to end up adding more surface detail here (apart from a bit of sand in gesso as a sealing coat) although I'm wondering if filler and crumpled tinfoil would break up some of the larger facets without changing the shape too much? (Sorry the pics are a bit crunchy - it's difficult to photograph white surface detail, I ended up boosting the local contrast to make up for my lack of lighting foresight...)

Very Minority Report! n the face of it, it seems a bit odd to have private public transport - you have public transport-style infrastructure, but car-style vehicle loadings. Are the infrastructure costs for pods less than for e.g. bus guideways? Will

Cheers chaps! On the integrating photos thing, I actually tried feeding them into Photosynth to see what happened, but there wasn't enough consistency in the data. I think it really needs pictures taken on the same day, and ideally with the same camera. Having to make do with the Mk. 1 Noggin.

Looks very tidy and fine-grained. Is the Normandy Earth stony, or something softer?

Thanks for the kinds words! I maybe didn't explain the trees thing very well - the slopes below track level to the road are mostly bare barring a few shrubs and saplings. It depends on the period though - it was pretty bushy in 1970s and 1990s images. This means there's usually good line of sight to the trains. The slopes above are heavily wooded, which makes them look steeper than they are - you just see the line of tree trunks and foliage. The fallen tree idea is a good one though, and could work on the other side of the valley which starts climbing up towards the front of the layout. I want to encourage people to look into the scene from the ends (hence the river and road providing a good leading line) so maybe thinning or felling the foreground trees away from the middle will help. That'd be the bit on the right here: Mikkel, you're absolutely right, this is a much bigger undertaking than I thought. I was subconsciously comparing the ~six square feet of layout with Whitemarsh's eight, and thinking that was all that mattered. But the cubage is so much bigger for this one - East Anglia is relatively free of sticking-up bits, the Höllental by definition isn't...

Falkenstein Tunnel by Will Vale, on Flickr I'm afraid these entries are a little dull, but it's nice to have a record of things as they happen. I've been piecing together the landscape at the left-hand end of the layout, which is a pastiche of two real locations - the Falkenstein tunnel (see the gallery at the lower right here) and the bridge over the Engenbachdobel. In real life they're the other way around. I'm trying to use cheaper, lighter expanded polystyrene for the smoothly-contoured bits and Styrofoam for the rocks areas which need carving. The polystyrene is a bit of a pain though - very messy, and it takes more care to get a clean cut that Styrofoam. It's all glued with PVA, which doesn't set in the middle of a lamination, but usually sets enough around the edges that it won't come apart. I need to wait a few days before rock carving starts though. Here's an overview of what I've done over the past couple of days: The top of the blue bit is probably too high and will get trimmed off, then I need to do plenty of carving and join everything up with filler. I'm tempted to lay some PVA-dipped kitchen paper over the smooth bits to unify them a bit more and try and avoid any cracking if the layout flexes before I get the profile board on the front. I must say this is all a lot more difficult than I expected - I've done scenery before and I thought I knew what was what, but copying prototype scenery on a large scale is quite different. The process of trying to integrate all the still photos and video I can find into an impression of what the 3D scene is like is more difficult than for buildings and mechanical things, because it's all so lumpy and hard to read! It doesn't help that it looks very different in different seasons, although winter pictures are good for understanding the flow of the 'bones' of the landscape. One thing which will look very different when finished - when the trees are planted, all the 45' slopes at the lineside will become effectively vertical, and raise the height of the whole thing by two or three inches.

I really like the slightly patchy whitewash, although perhaps it needs a bit of darkening at the base of the walls - the contrast with the deck there is quite strong. That aside, the colour tones on all the parts are gorgeous - really rich without being garish or Kodachrome-like. it may be worth putting a temporary roof over it before deciding what to do with it though - it might end up looking quite different with some shadowing?

I refuse to believe anything about this is less than exquisite, I think it looks amazing. The articulation shot is very impressive, I hadn't realised just how much travel you'd built into the bogie - usually those kinds of shots are reserved for offroad RC buggies etc. You might be able to do something like the RC cars for braking - you could use a relay or solid-state switch to connect the motors to a resistance (with heat sink!) when track power is turned off or below some threshold, and to track power when it's available. But that might be a bit too much like making the innards of an electric loco and not a diesel...

That's very impressive. Is it possible to reverse the move? I'm slightly disturbed to admit that I had a dream about chain shunting on Brewhouse Quay last night - it was actually a lot like this, except there was a small dog helping!

This is a huge improvement on the pictures you posted before, you can see all the detail in the brickwork which was lost in the JPG compression in the earlier ones. Assuming the roof is grey, the white balance reads about right to me. If you want to double-check many cameras allow you to photograph a grey card and use that to take a manual white balance setting, or you can use it afterwards in Photoshop etc. to do the same thing. The fringing on the chimney pots may not be easily avoidable - it looks like chromatic aberration on the high contrast edges. Some tips here which look useful.

Very nice, I like the shot of the 66 on the superelevated curve.

I agree whole-heartedly with the good wishes, and would suggest either the 009 or O-16.5 projects to start with. Apart from a selfish wish to see more narrow gauge on RMWeb, having something small get done quickly is motivating. Also with the roundy-roundy you can leave the train running in the background while you get on with some modelling - very comforting somehow.

Thanks chaps. I suspect the best plan is to carry on as pictured - Jon you're right that the other compromises are maybe worse. The running on the sharp curves is actually pretty good, it's just the extreme silliness it engenders as the train folds up into a half-a-hexagon or near enough to that The saving grace for the right hand end *might* be that it'll be possible to photograph one or other tunnel mouth on the short section without it being obvious that the other is just out of shot. Anyway, it's ballasted now, so that's a job ticked off, and I've boxed the left hand tunnel in and started on the missing landforms. Photos to follow. I hope whoever 'rated' this entry 1 star doesn't mind too much about the slow progress.

Good advice, thanks. These have been touched in with various colours, but when drybrushing the ballast the lighter tones over those sleepers which still have a brown hue do look very chocolatey The real sleepers on this stretch are also interesting since it's laid partially with metal Y-sleepers. I chickened out of trying to represent those, but they have quite a nice rusty tone which spreads into the ballast.

Train to Freiburg by Will Vale, on Flickr I thought I'd take all the junk (well, most of it) off the layout so I could see how things were going. The ballast has worked out well, the tunnels are boxed in at long last, and I like the sweep of the track at the left hand end. Still no bridge though, as you can see: The problem I've come across is that with the tunnel through the Hirschsprung in place, and the Oberen Hirschsrpung Tunnel which hides the exit to the fiddle yard, there isn't really enough room in between to capture the necessary features. There should be a rock shed, which is at least half a full-length coach, maybe a bit more, then various retaining walls and space to see a decent length of train before the next tunnel swallows it up again. On the model there's rather less space: Compare this with the real location: http://maps.google.de/?ll=47.937428,8.021425&spn=0.00173,0.004128&t=k&z=19&vpsrc=6 It's frustrating, since the real thing isn't impossibly long, it's just more room than I've left space for. I was so keen to get the scale of the bridge at the left hand end exact, and retain the sweep of the track up to the middle tunnel, that the interesting right-hand side has got rather marginalised. The bridge isn't even there in reality, it's just out of scene to the left before the Falkenstein Tunnel I suspect there isn't much I can do about this at this point - shifting the whole RHS left a bit is possible but I don't think I have the time - only about 7 weeks to finish the layout now. A less dramatic option would be to push the final tunnel mouth back around the return curve, but the scale length coaches look pretty silly on 145mm radius, the fine scale track stops just inside the tunnel, and I'd probably have to make a considerably wider-than-scale portal to avoid scraping paint off the coach sides. I may end up compressing the rock shed and walled section behind the portal (the tunnel was partially destroyed by Wehrmacht forces near the end of WW2, and rebuilt with some fairly serious walls where once was bare rock - see the Tunnel Portale site for more details).

Ah, but then you stopped to photograph the work and blog about it Great progress for such a short time, and that lorry looks very fine for a die-cast.

Huzzah! Glad to see you've bitten the bullet and got back to it, and that the modelstrip worked so well. The in-primer shot shows an excellent finish and all the detail is still there. The use of elastic for sandpipes is intriguing. I've fallen foul of the class 60 ones a couple of times (they're a springy engineering plastic and are so close to the wheel treads that if the bogies have any sag they clip pointwork) and have ended up trimming them back. Maybe I can look at replacing them. Presumably the elastic just deflects if it encounters an obstacle?

Pictures look good to me - thanks for posting them! My favourites are shots 2 and 3 of Hedges Hill Cutting, and both Batty Moor pictures. As you say, excellent layouts and all new to me. Judging from the movement of trains in some of the images, you must have a very steady hand!

I thought I'd already replied but maybe it didn't stick, sorry for the delay. What you see in the Skalescenics picture above is already sieved, I found there wasn't much material which didn't go through the holes in one tea strainer, and nothing which went through the holes in the other It does seem fairly evenly-sized. I could probably do with finding an in-the-middle mesh for the future! I've had a go at changing the colour a bit today - see the next entry for more.

Tinted ballast comparison by Will Vale, on Flickr Cold as in colour temperature. The finer ballast I'm using (as seen on the right in the above picture) is a bit too blue-grey and not buff enough, so it needs to be coloured. I poured some onto a bit of MDF and set it as I had on the layout, using alcohol and Klear (stay off the floor polish!) Once that was dry I tried various colouring options: From left to right, MIG Ashes White, lightly then heavily applied. MIG Beach Sand, and their neutral and dark washes. Then GW Tallarn flesh acrylic drybrushed over the ballast, and MIG Gulf War Sand. The pigments were applied by mixing with fixer and flooding the surface. I think they're all too yellow, and the other colours that I have are darker rather than lighter than the current ballast. My favourite, unexpectedly, was the pink drybrushed paint. I did a test section of track as seen above, using Tallarn Flesh, then Dheneb Stone (a sort of concretey colour) and finally a very light tough of pure white. It's not quite right still, but much better than before. I'm hoping that dry powders and a brown wash around the rails will finish it off. Here's an extreme close-up - the conduit in the foreground is 1mm Evergreen section scored at ~3mm intervals and painted the same way as the concrete on Whitemarsh. I ran some MIG dark wash into the grooves since they weren't showing up in pictures. Is it me or do the sleepers look like Mars Bars? I might have to do something about that when I touch in the rails and chairs, as well as knock the stray ballast grains off.

I realised I never replied to your Paxton Road Mk. 2 idea. I think it's a good plan - somewhere between a photo plank and a shunting plank. I'd be tempted to get a turnout on there, wiring isn't *that* bad, but maybe that's just the kind of over-complication which gets in the way of finishing. Mind you, if you can handle a traverser, points should be easy The biggest difficulty seems to me to be what to do at the ends. Unless you're prepared to only photograph side-on, you'll want something to mask the exit from the modelled scene. Maybe mirrors a la Hendre Lane would be a good fit here?

Unteren Hirschsprung Tunnel (West) by Will Vale, on Flickr I dunno, you wait ages for a blog entry, then two come along at once! With two months to go until the exhibition, my progress really needs to make the leap from "glacial" to "avalanche". My current focus is the track bed (see previous entry) and civil engineering - once those jobs are out of the way I can finish the basic landforms and get the profile boards on. The main things required are four tunnel portals, some retaining walls, and a bridge. I've already made a start on one tunnel portal, so I made some blanks for two more in front of the television last Sunday night, and then took them with me to a local club meeting where I sat and sliced off 1.5 x 3mm 'stones' from an Evergreen section and stuck them around the arches: When I got home, I looked at my reference again and realised that what I thought was a common constructional style encompassed a lot more variety than anticipated. In particular, the two new portals both had larger stones, and one (the Oberer Hirschsprung Tunnel Westportal) had a mixture of stone types, an interesting coping, and was made of blockwork rather than random stone. I filled the gaps between the lower arch stones with Tamiya putty and re-carved them, and added a suggestion of the coping with Evergreen rod. The reason the ink lines are so messy is twofold - I picked up an unsuitable pen from my desk to mark the approximate line of the wall, and I'd already scuffed the surface in preparation for the clay layer. The ink went wandering off down the scratches giving the whole thing a rather spidery, gothic appearance Once the arch details were more-or-less there, I smeared neat PVA over the surface and pressed small pieces of DAS clay into it to make a fairly even layer. As you can see it ends up being very thin, but it hasn't shown any signs of flaking away or causing trouble despite being well under 0.5mm thick in places: Once dried (overnight) and sanded back slightly I carved the random stone and less random blockwork with a small screwdriver. There are likely better tools but it does the job! It would make a lot of sense to do this in the flat rather than after building the tunnel liner and supporting framework. It's not a problem for the random stone at all, but it makes holding a ruler across to carve the regular blocks a bit of a pain. They are somewhat wonky as a result, but I don't think that's too obvious. For finishing, I undercoated everything fairly heavily with Citadel black acrylic and let it dry. The stone colours were built up with drybrushing rather than brush painting, using various browns. I then touched in individual stones with darker and lighter tones and highlighted various edges. I'm not delighted with the gappy arch on this one, I think I'll have to fill the gaps and retouch it since there's not so much greenery I can use to hide them. I am quite pleased with the stone colour which seems pretty close to the prototype pic. It's not shown in the correct place on the layout either - it goes at the far right - but there was too much junk in the way For the random stone tunnel in the header pic, the mortar was created by washing the surface with MIG concrete pigment dissolved in their pigment fixer. A bit scary since it goes green! I wiped it off the raised part fairly quickly, and waited nervously for it to dry. The effect isn't bad I think, and it had the side effect of tying together the rather speckly stonework into something more coherent. I need to spend a little while running a dark wash into some of the joins, because they don't all have obvious mortar, and redo some of the detail painting of stains, bloom, etc. which the wash has masked. More soon hopefully - various capping stones to make, and I need to box in the tunnel interiors with foamcard so scenery can go over the top.

Ballast by Will Vale, on Flickr This always feels like a make-or-break point for layout building. You've got to do it, but once you have going back is impossible, or at least wildly unpleasant. I have ballasted Z track before, as seen here on Igelfeld, but the ballast I used was pretty coarse. I was happy with it at the time, but given that the new layout has closer-to-scale rail profile, I felt it needed closer-to-scale ballast as well. Before getting into that, I laid the track with superglue directly onto the MDF trackbed. This was previously sealed with 50:50 PVA and water. Finally the whole lot was painted with Tamiya red-brown from a rattle can, getting things to the state shown here: I then touched in various sleepers with various blends of thinned dark grey and brown acrylics: and that was all the easy wins won. Time to go rooting around in the ballast supplies. I did some dry tests with a whole range of things from my scenery box, including Woodland Scenics fine, and sieved Hornby fine gravel which is what I used on Whitemarsh. I really like the colour of the latter, but they were all overscale: Counting lumps on prototype pictures, I think something like eight to ten grains between each pair of sleepers is required to be somewhat close to scale. In my tray of scenery bits I have some very fine gravel/rock dust from (I think) Jordan or one of the other European scenery manufacturers. I used this to make gravel walking routes on Whitemarsh. The size is good, but the colour is wrong - too uniform and too cool and dark. I ended up mixing in some fine silica sand from the art shop, which lightens things a bit and breaks up the uniformity: Not too bad, although rather messy. Yesterday I got the lineside cable trunking finished off and painted, so I couldn't put off the ballast any longer. Brushing it into place was a royal pain - it's light enough that it doesn't sit naturally, plus the track has a webbing between sleepers, so everything had to be very carefully positioned and tamped with a very fine brush and my fingers. Plus the invaluable "bit of folded postcard" for dishing it out in the first place. Doing a couple of feet of track was incredibly hard work, surprisingly so since ballasting is normally something I quite enjoy. A trapped nerve which is bothering my left bicep didn't make things any easier either! Thankfully, after the (literal!) pain of spreading the stuff, bonding it was easy-peasy. I misted everything with neat alcohol (IPA) from a pump spray bottle until it looked wet, then applied Klear to the edges with a pipette. It absorbed beautifully and, joy of joys, drew itself under the rails to set the ballast between the sleepers. At least provided it was damp enough on either side. This was a huge advantage since applying the Klear between the rails can leave glossy spots on the sleepers - this are hard to get rid of without a lot of painstaking painting. A few hours later it'd dried up quite nicely: It's still not the right colour, and in a couple of places it's a bit darker than this, so I'm not out of the woods yet. I think some very careful dry-brushing (or possibly a wash of MIG pigments?) should lighten the colour to the point where I can then apply brown washes to correct the hue. Watch this space...