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Will Vale

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  1. Will Vale

    Minor titivations

    By Will Vale,

    (click pictures for big versions)
    I spent time on Whitemarsh last week so that I could enter in the NZAMRC 2012 Convention competition. I opted to just take the bridge end - nothing's been done to the other module which is definitely lagging behind now
     
    My main aim was to try and fill in various unfinished or messy-looking areas. The worst offenders were the last-minute patches of grass I added before Railex in 2010 which were applied straight over the ballast, and didn't have any "reinforcement" from earth or weeds. They looked a bit odd as a result, so I've been sprinkling on various mixtures of scenic fluff to fill in around the grass, and tamping it down with a dry brush before wetting and applying matt medium. I also pulled up some of the grass and thinned it out near the bridge.

     
     
    You can see the results around the buffer stop and ballast/grass edges which I think look a bit more "faired in" than they did. I also replaced the (prototypical, but odd-looking) single Rosebay Willowherb between the two lines with some more subtle weeds:
     
     

     
    Another job was finishing off painting the concrete trunking. Once that was done I added some shadows on the ballast with a dark wash (not everywhere, but patchily) to define this a bit better. Also on the concrete front, I nicked the four lamps I made for the other end of the layout and added some new pads for them to sit on. They aren't wired up yet, and I need to get some more brass tube to make proper sockets for them, but they look nice and help reinforce the connection between layout and prototype.
     

     
     
    I noticed (only after a while...) that the neat alcohol I use for wetting the fine textures had faded the paint on the bridge girder, which was a bit annoying. Luckily it wasn't hard to recover it by drybrushing with the original colour, keeping a little bit of the faded paint in places for variety. On the other side of the girder I've painted some details on the footpath and weathered the road.
     
     

     
    Lastly I filled in the empty spot with a rusted Little Grey Fergie (TE20) since we used to see them around when I was growing up in the fens. The weathering job is very simple and comprised three steps - Dullcote, MIG washes, and MIG pigments. It's not subtle but I think it does the job OK. I also removed the overscale steering wheel.
     

     
    I'm afraid these pictures look rather strong and punchy, and the white balance is off in a couple. I think that my colour calibration isn't set up properly somewhere since they look more subtle in Lightroom. I'll try and sort that out before doing too much more.
     
    I've also done some quickie experiments with focus stacking, which is cool but tricky to get right, so I don't have anything to show yet.
  2. Will Vale
    Relay boxes by Will Vale, on Flickr
     
    ...have been greatly exaggerated. I have been modelling in my spare time, just not railway modelling, so I'm doing better than last year at least...
     
    But I have done something train-related today - I dug Whitemarsh out of the cupboard and finished painting all the cable trunking which had only had a base coat of cream paint until now. I'm trying to get the bridge end of the layout ready to take to the NZAMRC convention at the end of the week, so of course I left it until Tuesday to start. D'oh.
     
    As you can see above, I made up a couple of Wills (my!) relay boxes and set them on a styrene plinth which has been painted to look like concrete. The paint job on the boxes was an experiment which I think sort of worked - they look nicely galvanised, but the paint looks gritty and coarse which isn't really in scale. I also added a pin wash around the details which looks quite stark in close-up but helps them "read" properly from a distance.
     
    These are going to be planted at the back of the layout tomorrow to fill in a little gap which has been bothering me. I've cut a space but I need to fill in around them still.
     

     
    I'm quite pleased with the padlock, which is seriously small (under 1mm square, 0.6mm deep, with 0.3mm wire for the shackle) but annoyed that I got a glue blob on the surface while sticking it on!
  3. Will Vale

    A truck for Tanis

    By Will Vale,

    Opel Blitz by Will Vale, on Flickr
     
    While I've fallen into the usual post-exhibition-leads-into-Christmas-holidays modelling lull, it's only been a railway modellling lull and I've actually got several non-train projects on the go at the moment. Thankfully I managed to steer my enthusiasm in the direction of railways again by building an Opel Blitz to use on a possible airfield extension to Tanis 1937.
     
    (If you haven't seen Tanis, it's an A3 diorama/mini-layout combining Tamiya 1:48 models and figures with scratchbuilt Decauville-gauge rolling stock in an attempt to capture something of the Indiana Jones movies in miniature.)
     

     
    The idea would be to extend the line off to the left, winding around/along a wadi and through a camp to the edge of an airfield. Given the theme the airfield is an intended as an excuse for some of the weirder WW2 Luftwaffe aircraft - I've almost finished a Do335 Pfeil, for example, and I have unbuilt kits of the Storch and the Go229 flying wing for when I muster the courage and skills to attempt them. I'm not going to worry about the combination of late-war prototypes and a pre-war setting, since Lucas and Spielberg didn't seem to either
     
    I thought a truck would be a good companion to this scene, and picked up the Tamiya-issued Italeri kit of the Opel Blitz in a HobbyLink Japan sale a year or two ago. It looked nice in the box but sat on the shelf for a while - I only got around to building it at the weekend and it's just seen the primer can today.
     
    I was intending to build it straight from the box since I don't know much about the real trucks, but ended up chasing up pictures on the internet and making various changes to suit as I went along.
     
     

     
    Things I've changed:
     
    * Removed the honking great screw bosses for attaching the cab and load bed to the chassis, which opens up the underneath.
     
    * Added a very rough scratch-built engine (and radiator, which isn't attached yet) since there was too much air visible through the (very nice) open slatted radiator grille.
     
    * Realised that I'd gone too far on the engine and arranged for the cab to be removable with a washer under the seat and a magnet in the fuel tank, so that I can still see it after the truck's finished.
     
    * Cut out one of the cab doors so I can pose it open, and added new pedals since what was in the kit bore little relation to reality.
     
    * Made framing for the canvas tilt from brass wire, rather than using the supplied plastic tilt. The load bed is pretty nice, but the tilt is the wrong shape (sloping sides, presumably for mould-removal reasons) and meets the top of the load bed in a straight line rather than a wavy fabric edge.
     
    * Removed the flag and tool clips from the wings and the towing triangle from the roof - I'm not sure if these were on the early trucks, and I think it suits the layout intent a bit better if it looks slightly less military. I've seen pictures of tools on the sides of the load bed so I might do that instead.
     
     
    I'm intending to make a new canvas cover from foil or tissue or something and leave the rear frame off, which is why it's probably OK to have the rather heavy wire for the tilt - it'll be hidden;) The primer reveals that the load bed pin marks need more putty... I also need to gently sand back the primer since it's rather grainy - this is probably to the good on the chassis, but the wooden sides and the cab will need to be made smoother.
     
    Anyway, hope you like it so far - I know this is only tangentially railway-related in itself but the skills do cross over and at some point it will have a layout to live on! For now it can share space with the Kubelwagen in the lower right, assuming I can squeeze it in there.
  4. Will Vale

    Railex 2011

    By Will Vale,

    This is a week late, but I spent a couple of hours today going through my images from Railex, adding captions, and picking some to show off. We had a good show, packing and setup were both painless, and I opted to put the layout up on plastic crates (weighted with bricks) on top of the supplied table to improve the viewing height. I think this worked quite well, but I need to give a bit more thought to display next time: The pelmet made conversations with punters a bit tricky at times, and without a backscene the fluorescent tubes were a bit hard on the eyes for the operators.
     
    We managed to get all three layouts (Höllental-Hirschsrpung, Tanis 1937, and Igelfeld) plus stock, light fittings, bricks and two operators into my dad's Prius, although it was a tight squeeze for me in particular. I didn't have a backup plan for the event that the new layout didn't fit, but thankfully it did
     

     
    The venue got pretty hot in the afternoon on both days, and was at times very busy indeed. I managed to see quite a bit more of it than last year since it was possible to leave the layout alone with something running around and go for a wander - the plan works! We also had help from Robert's friend George on the Saturday which was fantastic, thanks George!
     
    The heat didn't seem to affect the track at all - I was worried about expansion in the yard lengths of finescale rail, but it all behaved beautifully (I had left one expansion gap) and the only minor issue was a bit of unglued track in the fiddle yard went a couple of mm sideways towards the end of the weekend - not a problem, and it's easy to fix in any case. The electrics were rock solid, and I'm glad I put some extra feeds in because it was possible to detect the voltage drop in places. Maybe some more are needed still.
     
    The control system also worked quite well - the fiddle yard roads are selected by a three position rotary switch and a push-button. Turn to pick a road, press the button to change the points, done. The only issue was we occasionally forgot to press the button resulting in the train leaving the yard happily but running into a dead road and stalling when it came back.
     

     
    Running was basically faultless provided we had the train correctly on the rails in the first place, less so if not - and this is easier said than done in 1:220. We did have a pile-up during an unprototypical banking of a 1930s streamlined express with a 1950s-condition BR85. It looked great and I wandered off for a bit, came back to find my dad saying "we had a bit of a disaster" and I was expecting to find my prize loco on the floor. Thankfully it wasn't that bad - it had shed its pony truck screw and then the truck, and the whole shooting match had piled into the wreckage on the next lap. Never mind, truck reattached and I think a dot of PVA as ersatz thread lock is warranted since it runs much better with that screw (which also retains the belly pan) loosened half a turn.
     
    Tanis I switched on in the morning each day and basically ignored - I think I had to give the loco a push once, other than that it was perfect. It still gets some very nice comments. As did the new project - the rocks generated quite a lot of interest in terms of how they looked, and how they were done. The presentation also got compliments which was nice since it's the first time I've done the whole proscenium arch thing.
     
    I did identify one major problem - while the train is visible for a good long time, it's out of view for slightly longer, and with the layout being very "new" looking and lacking in detail, there isn't much to engage the attention while we get the next one out. Igelfeld and Tanis are much better in this regard since more of the track is visible, and there are a far more non-train details to look at in the meantime. Apart from doing all the detailing, I think it might help to have some kind of flashing "train coming" light at each end so people know what to expect. Or some kind of moving feature, but I don't know what that could be that wouldn't also be cheesy. Possibly some prototype info wouldn't go amiss either.
     
    My favourite quotes of the weekend, apart from the usual "Look at the tiny trains!" were a German diorama modeller (whose work I've marvelled at before) asking me if I was also German, and overheard by George a small boy being offered a train of some kind by his parent and saying "No, I don't want that one, I want a Z gauge!" I do feel sorry for any parents who've been influenced in this way by our efforts...
     
    Finally here are some highlights from other layouts in the show:
     

    Kerosene Creek, originally by Raoul Quinn
     

    1970s Rhodesia, by Paul Napier
     

    Taumaranui (I think this is a club layout, I'm afraid I don't know which club.)
     

    Manners Street, by Kerry Willard
     
    There are more pictures and layouts in the gallery which should be attached to this post, or if you can see Flickr where you are, I recommend looking at them in my Flickr set since the full-size images are available there as well:
     
    * Railex 2011 on Flickr
  5. Will Vale

    Sunshine and steam

    By Will Vale,

    Ballast empties by Will Vale, on Flickr
     
    I thought I'd try and be like the cool kids and attempt some smoke effects with Photoshop. This is a white mask with a lot of dodge + burn + smudge, then some filters, unsharp mask and selective re-blurring. I still don't think it's detailed enough compared to the reference I was looking at, but in fairness I was using a trackpad. I'll have to try this again with a tablet when I'm at my desk. Here's a crop (if you click through you can see it at 100%) of the above image (modulo rotation) to show what it looks like close-up:
     
     

     
    I also got a couple of shots of the Kleber Express descending the valley towards Freiburg in the morning sun:
     
     

     
     
     

     
    The last one isn't coming out as well as I'd hoped when designing the layout - I think because there's so little room between the tunnels. It'll be interesting to see how this develops as the area acquires more detail.
     
    Oh, I forked out for a Flickr Pro account so you can click through for the really big (original size) versions now!
  6. Will Vale

    Setting-up time

    By Will Vale,

    Unteren Hirschsprung Tunnel by Will Vale, on Flickr
     
    Well, it's showtime tomorrow! I've been finishing things off as best as possible this week - as ever there's an awful lot which could be done that hasn't been done, but I think the overall result has the right kind of consistency. The deciduous forest also failed to materialise - I made and planted a lot of trees, but they weren't really good enough to they ended up getting yanked out agian. The bog brush firs are a cliche but they're one I quite like, they don't stand out as being wrong to me in the same way.
     
    My main complaint is that it's a little dull - there aren't any people, vehicles, buildings, signs, or details apart from landscaping, so at the moment the layout feels a bit like a canvas waiting to be filled in some strange way. I'm quite looking forward to approaching this job at a slightly gentler pace - three months for one layout isn't enough time really, although it does help to keep me motivated.
     
    Luckily my DB stock in both Epoch III and Epoch V modes is nice and colourful, and everything works well, so tomorrow I can run trains and chat to people without having a late night beforehand - I think that's the first time actually!
     
     
     

     
    Big thanks to Murray for securing our group a corner where we're all together, and scaring up some barriers from the Kennel Club - that means I can put the layout up on crates on top of the trestle table to get the right viewing height. I'll try and get some better pictures tomorrow, but for now here are some grab shots (with slightly off colour balance - some kind of ICC problem maybe - and blurry moving train) of the new bits:
     
    Here's the bridge over the Engenbachdobel - I made a nice set of checkrails and centre walkway for this, but they don't fit as the locos seem to protrude slightly beneath rail-top level - ah well.
     
     
     

     
    and here's the narrows of the Hirschsprung itself. My dad found an N-scale goat on one of the trade stands, I might grab that tomorrow as a stag stand-in
     
     
     

     
    If any Kiwis are reading this and fancy visiting tomorrow or Sunday, come to the show and say hi!
     
    http://www.eventfinder.co.nz/2011/nov/porirua-mana/railex-2011
  7. Will Vale

    On the home stretch?

    By Will Vale,

    Looking a bit tidier now by Will Vale, on Flickr
     
    I forgot to pose a train! Rats... But I thought it was worth posting the picture anyway since it shows quite clearly what's done and what's to do. The key thing I've done today is sand down the baseboard, round all the corners, prime and paint it. I also sanded down the brush marks on the pelmet and brackets, dusted them off, and gave them two more coats of black with a roller. The fascias have had one of primer, three of semi-gloss acrylic "enamel", also with a roller. The one I have was left in our house by the previous owners and probably isn't appropriate - it's foam - but it does leave a nice dimpled surface which is probably more forgiving than a properly smooth one.
     
    I feel much better now - still a lot to do, but the weather-critical thing is out of the way. We had a fine day today so I took lunchtime to do most of the work, and did some day-job stuff the night before to give me another couple of hours. Forecast for the rest of the week is much less promising.
     
    Next job: the river? Then stick down the loose mountain at the right front.
     
    The picture is taken under the layout's own lighting, as Mr. Nevard would say I took the white point off the wall behind it so it ought to be fairly representative of what it looks like for real, although this is taken at night so there's not much ambient filling things in. The pelmet houses a couple of T5 fluorescent fixtures daisy-chained together with daylight (looks like 6400K) tubes. It was a mission to get hold of two compatible, not broken, fixtures for reasons which aren't worth going into, but I do have them now.
     

    (detail of previous pic, since I don't have a Flickr Pro account...)
     
    The scenery is mostly Woodland Scenics, which I think shows a little, but it will probably look more interesting when the trees go in. There's also the need for a lot more greenery breaking up the cliff faces, and all the plain brown or grey stuff needs covering up.
  8. Will Vale

    When scenery attacks

    By Will Vale,

    Zombie Hands by Will Vale, on Flickr
     
    Just a quick update to say that I'm still plugging away at the layout despite work, distractions, and minor disasters. No decent pics yet but I have done the following:
     
    * Melted some track and distorted the track bed.
    * Painted all the rocks
    * Made a lighting pelmet (which works) plus brackets to fix it to the layout, and primed and sanded it.
    * Added ground cover to most of the layout.
    * Weathered and installed the bridge (more-or-less, it still needs a central pillar!)
    * Started getting some trees ready.
    * Made the river bed.
     
    The first really got me down - I was using a lamp to dry some Klear which had run off the scenery onto the ballast, and forgot about the inverse-square law. Six inches away - no problem. Two inches away - melty mess. The sleepers softened and the ballast swelled pushing everything out of whack. Luckily I caught it before it got any worse.
     
    I was able to dig out the ballast, cut through some of the sleeper web, and reshuffle them. I also had to slice off a few chairs. There's still a bit of gauge narrowing but I don't think re-laying that track is a realistic option, and both my 10-coupled locos run through it happily pushing or pulling stock. I eventually managed to remove the hump in the MDF track bed by running a long M2 bolt through both it and a very big "washer" (MDF offcut) under the layout. With careful tightening this brought the hump down to the level of having to look for it if I wanted to find it. I'm glad this worked - watching stock go up and down over the hump was pretty silly.
     
    It's been reballasted since, and with a bit of weathering it'll be OK, but it was a miserable afternoon afterwards, as you can probably imagine
     
    The last thing on the list is where the awesome combination of paint and clay (I kneaded tube acrylic into white DAS-type clay to colour it) turned my hands into Night of the Living Dead.
     
    The biggest worry at the moment is priming, sanding and painting all the exterior surfaces. That takes a while and I don't know if there's any fine weather to work with this week. We'll see I guess.
     
    Scenery continues in any bits of spare time I can find. Detailing is looking unlikely. 5 days to go!
  9. Will Vale
    Spaghetti Monster by Will Vale, on Flickr
     
    It started out a bit messy, but it turned out alright in the end.
     
    This morning I started on some odd jobs on the railway, finishing shaping the front proflle board which had been glued overnight, puttying the joins, painting rocks, and doing more weathering on the track. At about 4 o'clock my wife brought me a parcel left by the courier with switches and wire, so all excited I thought I would make a start with them.
     
    I'd already installed feeds in the running line and the single fiddle yard road, but they were never connected up except for testing. I wired the feeds at both ends to small distribution boards cut from a sheet of Veroboard, and did the same for the point motor wiring. The boards were then linked up and threaded through holes cut in the cross members in the usual way. If only I'd cut them during construction this would have been easier.
     
    I had already worked out a scheme to control the fiddle yard power and points with a 3x3 rotary switch, after a couple of false starts on paper. I also considered a (small) diode matrix but the Märklin accessories use AC and I wasn't sure if they'd like half-wave of full-wave DC instead. Two poles of the switch act as the "matrix" and control the points for the three-road yard, with pairs at opposite ends wired in parallel. The feed to the switch goes through a momentary pushbutton, so to switch the points you set the road and press the button, all fairly standard. The nice thing (to me) is that the third pole switches the track current to the appropriate road as well, so it's all synchronised.
     
    I soldered up the switch and button leads and ran them to a tag strip, then hooked up loose end of the distribution board to the other side. And it all worked first time! That's never happened before, not ever.
     
    Then I went ahead and tidied up the wires. The point motor wires are over-long and therefore messy, but they're captive leads and I didn't want to cut them short in case the points get re-used on a future project. I considered desoldering and resoldering a couple of wires to make things bundle up neater, but decided against it. it does look a bit better now though:
     

     
    I got my eBay-purchased BR 101 out to play with and run in, and it was rough as a rough thing. Suspecting dirty, I cleaned the track thoroughly. It still wasn't great though, and I realised it was only picking up on one bogie - clearly not as it should be. I removed the offending bogie and cleaned the wheels and contact strips after checking continuity, then tweaked the wiper which carries power to the body. The chassis then ran beautifully, so I put the body back on and it died - lights on, no motor More serious dismantling ensued, the motor was OK when connected directly to power, and it turned out that one of the tiny phosphor bronze whiskers which take power from the main PCB to the motor cap was out of line. Again, adjusted, tweaked, and it's now one of my best-running locos. Result.
     
    Finally at about 11 o'clock I thought I ought to do the rest of the fiddle yard, so laid the track (a quick job with superglue, thanks Beast!) and soldered up the feeds. I had to spend half an hour finding the insulating fishplates first, bought mail order to replace the first lot which I lost. Thankfully I managed not to lose them in turn, well not permanently at least.
     
    Anyway, at about half-past midnight, it was all done and I spent a happy fifteen minutes shuttling locos around in the fiddle yard and sending them out to work. Then I went to bed to write this diary entry. It was the best day ever!
     
    by William Vale age 36 and a quarter.
  10. Will Vale

    Road markings

    By Will Vale,

    IR2217 by Will Vale, on Flickr
     
    I've been dreading this particular job but I at least figured out a way to do it, so yesterday and today I've been gritting my teeth and getting down to marking out the B31 through the Höllental. From photos I think the markings are between 100 and 150mm wide, which is roughly 0.5-0.75mm in 1:220 - ouch. Thankfully they're almost all solid lines - this is a dangerous road so no passing on the stretch I've depicted. On the prototype there's a passing lane just out of scene to the right, and I'm not sure what happens on the left.
     
    I primed the road last week with Plastikote grey lacquer primer, which has a nice robust finish and is a decent starting point for tarmac colour, if a little cool. Then I made a little plastic spacing gauge which would allow me to reach the centre line and edges using the nearby kerb as a reference. So far so good. So I tried walking this thing along the edges of the road with a white gel pen, and a white pencil through the holes - no good. The gel pen, which gives lovely lines on black card, didn't flow consistently on the smooth paint so tended to leave a thin-thick line, or just peter out altogether. The pencil wasn't solid enough and looked chalky, although it was relatively neat.
     
    I wondered about laying out lines with Tamiya tape as a mask, which is what I did on Whitemarsh, but it's too tricky to get it to follow the curves and get a narrow enough gap with two strips. Then I went looking for narrow striping tape, and saw a tip on an aero-modelling forum about using two blades to cut consistent half-mil strips. I tried this, success, but Tamiya tape is yellow not white, and I was worried about it peeling.
     
    Going back to the idea of masking, I tried putting tape down the middle of the road and using my spacing gauge with two Swann-Morton #10 blades taped together to cut a narrow strip. I was able to do this and peel it up, and painting through it gave good results! Unfortunately all the experiments had made a mess of the road (the gel pen tended to dig up the paint when I pressed too hard) so I sanded it all back and re-primed it. Then I ran out of tape and had to get some more. Two afternoons, half a roll and four #11 blades (much better control than #10 on curves) later, I got this:
     
     

     
    Please excuse the small scale willy-waving ruler shot, I've resisted the temptation so far (I think?) but this was the fiddliest thing I've done yet. In the interests of full disclosure, here's a less good bit. It's worth clicking through to the larger version on Flickr to see all the yuck.
     
     

     
    The biggest problem is that I don't have a delicate enough touch to cut through the tape but not the paint/MDF underneath, so there are grooves visible around the stripes in places where I've had to re-do bits. They are very narrow though, so they may fill up if I touch in the paint. I either need to match the colour of the Plastikote spray, or decant some and paint with that maybe?
     
    Now back to painting rocks, or possibly retirement to the loony bin...
  11. Will Vale

    Quickie rock painting

    By Will Vale,

    Rock painting experiment by Will Vale, on Flickr
     
    The plain brown undercoat has finally reached the right side of the layout, so I've been putting some (maybe) final paint on the rocks on the left. It's not too bad, it looks a bit frosty and overdone under my worklight, but nice in daylight and it seems to photograph OK. The green bits are just stood there to get a feel for the colour balance - it's going to be very green which I think will reduce the contrast in the rocks and make them appear a bit lighter as well.
     
    Recipe for this was raw umber + gesso undercoat, drybrushed with dark grey, light grey, light concrete, and white. I then added a brown-black wash in the crevices and wiped most of it off again, and retouched the drybrushing with the addition of pink and yellow for a bit of variation. The problem with all this drybrushing is it brings out the sand which I don't much like - thankfully I covered some of it with clay on the key vertical surfaces. I hope that the lack of sand in the undercoat at the other end of the layout (lesson learned) will leave enough surface texture to get the same level of detail in the paint - it's a bit of a balancing act.
     
     

     
    There are one or two spots which shout "model" to me on this cliff - the diamond-shape cut-out looks very knifey, and you can see the structure of torn Styrofoam in a couple of the vertical cracks. I think vegetation will be an effective disguise for both of these, so nothing to worry about yet.
     
    I've also been working on the bridge walkways and abutments but don't have anything good to show for it yet. And I had to redo the primer coat on the roadway after repairs - it took me four or five attempts to find a way to create decent road markings of 0.5-0.75mm width, but I think I've got it now. When the primer is really hard, when I've restocked my Tamiya tape, and when if I'm feeling really brave, I'll try and get them all done.
     
    In other news I received a BR 101 in the post today, so I can run a (short) version of IR2216/2217 - now cancelled, I think this was the last long distance service to use the line?
     
    [edit: added a rather crunchy contrast-enhanced detail from the original pic.]
  12. Will Vale

    Three weeks to go

    By Will Vale,

    Three weeks to go by Will Vale, on Flickr
     
    As requested, a few photos of progress in a sort of "where are we now" sort of way. Afraid I didn't pose any stock on them. Above you can see the whole layout, with two big jobs remaining - the rockwork in the right foreground (from where the stag is alleged to have leaped) and the groundwork around the bridge.
     
     

     
    The big things I've been doing this week were carving the rocks at the right, and making the road. The pavements are thin styrene cut to shape freehand using rubbings of the edge of the road to get the shape, and drawing a line parallel to this by moving a thin spacer along following the first line. That was quite a fiddle, it took the best part of a day and a half to mark, cut, install and paint it all. The paint is grey primer as on Whitemarsh, which will get weathered in due course. I also need to do the markings :gulp:
     
     

     
    I think I mentioned before that I made the rock shed - I painted that up this week as a bit of light relief. It's supposed to be blockwork but my attempts at drawing the blocks with a white pencil were, shall we say, less than accurate. I've painted it such that they are mostly erased, then I went back and added course lines with a propelling pencil in key places. This is the first time I've seen it in close-up and I think it mostly works, but maybe I should do some more of the neat block marks on the columns where the drybrushing hasn't done much to erase the white lines??
     

     
    I really need to stop messing around filling and re-carving and get some brown on the landscape so I can see what it looks like - the reason I'm holding off is that the surface coat makes carving harder, so I want to get it as nice as possible before taking that step.
     
    Off out now to try and track down some fluorescent fittings to make a lighting rig - a bit more professional than previous efforts, maybe the "I disapprove of badly-lit exhibition layouts" crowd will be appeased. ..
     
    [Oops - duplicate pic. Now fixed!]
  13. Will Vale
    What number am I thinking of? by Will Vale, on Flickr
     
    "Sixty-nine, dudes!"
     
    These are the profile boards for the ends of the layout. Over an hour's sweaty work to measure and cut out with a Stanley knife, no new scratches on the kitchen table though! The cut-outs are hand-holds for lifting rather than tunnel access - it's easier to reach in from behind the layout since the openings are bigger. The sticky-out top bits are a possible lighting pelmet mounting strategy, if it doesn't work out I can always cut them off.
     
    When I came to attach these (after levelliing the ends mildy with a surform) I got a bit of a surprise. I know how long the layout is, but I didn't really appreciate that length until I had to stand on a chair to apply glue to the top surface!
     

     
    It's setting up now, slowly since it's been damp out.
     
    Other progress over the past few days - the road has pavements, which were a lot of work to cut from styrene, and a retaining wall from Heki foam. This is a bit fragile and frankly could be better, but I don't see another solution for now. I'll add a capping strip later and repaint it.
     
    I've also done a lot of carving on the Hirschsprung, which is starting to look more like the real one. I'll try and take some better pictures when the board's horizontal again!
  14. Will Vale
    Hirschsprung retaining wall by Will Vale, on Flickr
     
    I think it's salt deposits from water running down the face of the retaining wall. If it was a bird it must have been a legendary beast.
     
    As you can see the retaining wall is painted up now - I used a similar method to the tunnel in the last post, although without the pink tones. After doing the basic drybrushing I added a 'mortar' mix of MIG Concrete with a little Industrial City Dirt, made into a heavy wash with their pigment fixer. After waiting a few minutes I wiped much it off again, but because I hadn't let the underlying paint harden properly I took off some of the drybrushing in the process. C'est la vie...
     
    It did dry up nicely in the recesses though, and because it's pigment powder the finish is nice and flat and dusty-looking. After a few hours I re-did the drybrushing (brown, light grey, concrete colour) and touched in a few stones with dark brown where I thought there was too much pale pigment on the surface.
     
    Then the fun began - with a small brush I painted in the water damage with thinned concrete colour, neat and thinned white, and a little Games Workshop Flesh Wash, which is a sort of chestnut-brown translucent inky thing. After looking at a close up picture I thought it was a bit brush-strokey so I went back with a very fine brush and added the narrowest streaks I could.
     
    It's not exactly like the prototype (I should have more of a gap on the right, for one thing) but it's close enough to be suggestive of it, so I'm pretty pleased.
     
     

     
    When it's all *very* dry I'm intending to reduce the contrast somewhat with either a thin brown wash, dry pigments, or both. I'd also like to add some of the old wide streaking with pigments or drybrushing, and maybe paint out some of the existing streaking where I got carried away if it still looks excessive.
     
    All in all this has been a very entertaining sub-project - it's always interesting when the tiny brushes come out! I will try and make sure my next post has no tunnels in it though
  15. Will Vale

    Painting blockwork

    By Will Vale,

    Step 1 by Will Vale, on Flickr
     
    I thought I'd try and put a step-by-step up for this, because when I went back to the earlier entry on this tunnel portal to try and duplicate the painting onto the second wall, I found I hadn't listed the paint colours. So this is partly for my benefit. But maybe it'll be useful. It's always tricky to remember to put the brushes down and take pictures between steps. Usual disclaimer - I don't think this is an exemplary result - it looks good from six inches away, but it's a bit weird at 100% magnification. But it was very quick and easy to achieve.
     
    Step 1, as seen above, was to undercoat the new surfaces with Games Workshop Chaos Black. This covers well, but has an annoying sheen to it. Luckily this will get killed by the painting steps. I painted out the places I'd applied more clay to the finished side with black at the same time.
     
    Step 2 is to drybrush the wall liberally with brown - in this case Graveyard Earth. Working mostly from top to bottom and from the corner inwards. I was pretty sloppy here and didn't worry too much about all the usual "remove the paint from the brush until you can't see any at all" advice - the idea here is to add a lot of colour quickly.
     
     

     
    Step 3 is to do the same (with a bit less paint this time) with a warmer brown called Calthan Brown to get some variation in tone.
     
     

     
    Step 4 attempts to age the browns and bring them towards neutral using a light blue-grey called Astronomican Grey. I love the names, they're so silly. For this step I varied the pressure on the brush, and used the smaller brush as well, in order to get a mixture of drybrushing and vertical streaking.
     
     

     
    Step 5 uses my favourite GW paint colour - Dheneb Stone. It's a warm light grey and is very useful for concrete, stonework, and any time you want to lighten colours without introducing white. I drybrushed with this fairly gently, and also stippled it onto the copings which are made from a much lighter stone. Note that the black still shows through a bit - I think this is OK.
     
     

     
    Step 6 is more work on the copings. I warmed them up by drybrushing and stippling with the Graveyard Earth I started the walls with, and then drybrushed more Dheneb Stone to re-highlight the edges. I think without this the colour is too cool.
     
     

     
    Step 7 is where I did three steps and forgot to take pictures, sorry! I drybrushed the blocks with a skin tone called Tallarn Flesh to push them towards the pink tone seen in the prototype pictures. I probably put a bit too much on to be honest - I like the result on the portal wall better than on the wing wall. I also got the black and white paints out. White to very gingerly highlight the copings, and less gingerly to make some bloom marks on the stonework and sharpen everything up. If you find you put too much on, smudging it with a finger usually rescues things.
     
    I mixed the black with one of the browns - Graveyard Earth I think - and used this to re-touch the edges of some blocks on the corner of the two walls. When drybrushing you automatically end up highlighting corners and raised detail, and while this is good in moderation I think it was too strong here. I did keep a bit of highlighting, just not all of it. Compare the corner above with the corner below - I think the lower one looks more natural.
     
     

     
    And that's it. To show how messy this looks in detail, have a look at these painful close-ups. I think the diagonal pattern in the lower pic is my thumbprint captured in the clay... The thing which annoys me about the result is the saw cuts I thought I'd lined up in the copings are rather mis-aligned. Hopefully I can stuff greenery into those gaps and hide it all when I bed the portal into the scene. I'll also look at adding some green algae staining at that point since I'll know where the plants are.
     
     

     
     

     
    I think one remaining job is probably to rub some powders into the new wall - I think I did that for the old one, it certainly looks a bit more coherent than the new one.
     
    Hope this was interesting! If you follow through this far, step 8 should probably be to apologise to your brushes for all the nasty things you did to them.
  16. Will Vale
    Bricks scribed by Will Vale, on Flickr
     
    Yet another tunnel portal post I'm afraid, but this is nearly the last one! I've carved the retaining wall and attached portal, as seen above. It wasn't entirely straightforward owing to the shape, so I thought given that and the different course heights on the different sections of stonework I'd better draw some guides before starting. I used a propelling pencil and a small styrene square as a ruler, tipping it carefully over the angle between the walls. It was easy to get wrong because the side wall of the portal is at a steep-but-not-vertical angle, and the lines kept wanting to meet it at right-angles. Thinking about it after the fact it would have been better to measure up from the baseline on both edges and the angle, then mark and join the dots?
     
     

     
    With that done I marked the edge every 2mm (walls) and 1/16" (portal) and scribed the courses. Because I couldn't put the wall down flat anywhere I didn't quite manage to follow the lines, and there are some overly-thin courses as a result. Since it's stonework I think that might not look too bad - although the prototype is quite even here, it's less than even elsewhere so it shouldn't be totally out of place.
     
    Having done all that I then realised the angle between the retaining wall sections was much too shallow :cries: So I had to cut it in half and reassemble the pieces. If nothing else this was a pretty good demonstration that clay bonded to styrene with PVA is a robust building material - no damage while trimming and flexing the parts.
     

     
     
    I reassembled them at a steeper angle and filled the gap with styrene strip and more clay.
     
    Once that was more-or-less dry I rejoined the courses across the angle, then carved the verticals as seen in the header image. I defaced some of the stones and rounded edges on several courses using a flat-headed screwdriver blade. It's very satisfying blowing the dust off and seeing the relief appear as if by magic. The enlargements are a bit cruel - there are plenty of visible marks from slipped tools, but I think it'll be quite acceptable once painted.
     
     
     

     
    Finally I sealed the surface with 1:1 diluted PVA - this contains the dust, and hopefully makes the sheet more plasticky and resilient. After it dried I went back and filled in a few low spots and a missing brick with more clay, and rounded off the copings on the portal. The copings received some grooves cut with the edge of a small file, to give the impression of individual stones.
     
     

     
    In other thrilling tunnel portal news, the last portal on the layout has had its gappy arch filled with clay (despite having painted it I knew I had to do this - it was annoying me in photos). I also cut copings from plastic strip, grooved with an ultra-fine saw since I wasn't able to line up file cuts reliably around the corners. The new copings are pleasingly chunky and seem like a good match for the prototype.
     
     

     
    Paint next, then these pieces can be fixed to the layout ready for the final bits of rockwork around the track!
     
    NB: The photos have an odd mix of halogen and daylight illumination because I was working at various odd moments of day and night. The really odd ones have the halogen light plus daylight in an attempt to highlight the relief. Maybe I should get a daylight bulb...
  17. Will Vale
    Retaining wall and tunnel by Will Vale, on Flickr
     
    For the Flying Kipper, obviously
     
    Not much to report last week - I slowly layered up some more foam for carving the Hirschsprung itself, but didn't get much more done than that until Sunday, when i had a blitz on the remaining structural engineering works. I built the retaining wall and east tunnel portal for the Unterer Hirschsprung Tunnel, as seen above. Then I knocked together some 2mm section to make the rock shed which was added rather more recently.
     
     

     
    As you can see from the prototype photo, this butts up against the original portal and extends the length protected from falling debris - the cliff is past vertical at this point.
     
    The other big thing I've been putting off and really needed to get around to was building the bridge over the Engenbachdobel. This is a 56m span deck girder bridge, and is scale length on the layout - quite a treat. I counted the bays on the girders to get the pitch, and found the nearest size of Evergreen strip and U-channel (with the strip such that it fits into the U). One packet of each was assembled in A-B-A-B fashion with the strip spacing the U channel out. I glued it all edge on to make a sort of ribbed sheet, and strips of this were cut out and fixed to a hefty styrene core. This is a perhaps pretty odd way of going about it - I was worried about getting the ribs vertical, and thought that working with long lengths first would make this easier than trying to line up lots of short lengths accurately.
     
     

     
    It worked, but my home-made ribbed sheet tended to roll up which made it rather tricky to handle. I cut the pieces over-length and after leaving it all under two feet of books overnight, it was possible to trim and file the edges flush with the core. I then filed away certain ribs and replaced them with splice plates. On the prototype these aren't completely evenly spaced, but I had 38 bays per girder rather than 32 (owing to rounding to a slightly thinner strip/channel size) so I went for a regular 8-2-8-2-8-2-8 spacing, with the splice plates over the pairs of bays.
     
    Finally some 0.5mm strip capped off the top and bottom. It all looks amazingly (to me at least) regular considering what a massive botch job the construction really was. Hooray for files and sandpaper!
     
    I did one other smaller job too - the tunnel at the RH end of the layout needed a bit of retaining wall/rock shed which was revealed in a photo angle I hadn't previously found. I added a second wall to it which has been covered with clay. Carving time tomorrow...
     
     

     
    I've started running into an interesting problem - this blog and my Flickr photos are coming up increasingly when I search for place names in the layout area. It's making research a bit circular, although looking for German-language results helps a bit!
  18. Will Vale

    Nicht nur für E-loks!

    By 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
  19. Will Vale
    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...)
  20. Will Vale

    Iceberg wrangling

    By Will Vale,

    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.
  21. Will Vale
    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).
  22. Will Vale

    Warming up cold ballast

    By Will Vale,

    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.
  23. Will Vale

    More tunnel portals

    By Will Vale,

    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.
  24. Will Vale

    Track and ballast

    By Will Vale,

    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...
  25. Will Vale
    I laid the fine-ish track last week and did some minimal wiring, and have run some trains successfully. The code 40-code 60 joints were reasonably trouble free, the most I had to do was tweak the end of a rail with pliers to smooth a bend. I'll try and take some pictures of those since there are some details I wouldn't mind getting an opinion on.
     
    I've been quietly wondering whether I'd get my modelling (as opposed to construction) mojo back, and it appears to have happened last night. Almost before I noticed I'd measured and drawn out the west portal of the Unterer Hirschsprung Tunnel, and building followed. It looks rough as a badger's bottom in the above picture, but I think with some primer and possibly a thin coat of gesso to mortar the stonework it'll turn out OK.
     
    Pleasingly, I found a dimensioned drawing of the tunnel after I'd worked it out from the photo' and I was right to within 1mm! Sadly, I can't re-use the pattern for the two outer portals on the layout because they're on the start of the return curves and it'll need the width eased by 1-2mm. I tried it with this one and the Doppelstockwagens just graze the sides, so hopefully it'll look pretty close.
     
    Construction was fairly simple - a sheet of 1mm styrene for the retaining wall, marked out and cut as a circle with tangets rather than the proper curve. The liner is 0.5mm styrene formed around a wooden spoon handle with boiling water, and the arch stones are 1.5mm slices of Evergreen 3mm x 0.75mm strip. I was going to use Tamiya putty for the carved rough stone, but couldn't find it, so I roughed up the surface and applied a very thin (about 0.5mm) layer of DAS clay over PVA, reasoning that the worst that'd happen would be that it'd all fall off!
     
    Luckily it didn't, so I had a go at carving the stonework with the blade of a small screwdriver. Quite pleasant work, although looking at it there are too many long lines in the pattern - it's difficult making random patterns as opposed to semi-regular ones. My approach was to break the space into larger polygonal areas and then subdivide them, but I think the polygonal edges have ended up being a bit too visible in the result.
     
    After brushing the dust off I painted a coat of dilute PVA over the clay to stabilise the surface. So far it's holding together, and it doesn't seem to want to chip away despite carving through to the styrene in a couple of places. I'm looking forward to painting it now!
     
    Here's a long shot of where the tunnel's going to end up. There'll be a huge slab of rock just behind the mouth which (I think) makes the slopes make more sense.
     

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