Monday, January 9, 2012

Summer happenings

December is usually the busiest time of the year with harvest in full swing. That means that there is very little time for modelling but I managed to get the weeping willow that I talked about in last post completed. I am very pleased with how it looks now that is finished.

I have started composing the Merri Meric river scenery and moving trees around trying to get a pleasing scene.
I think it will need more trees and that the water level needs to rise about 100 millimeters (4 inches).
Once harvest and Christmas where behind me I have been able to spend quite a bit of time on the layout. I have been going to post when I got the layout tidied up but it could be a while before that happens so please excuse the mess in the photos.
This is now what you see when you enter the shed. The hole in the backdrop leads to the staging yard that will have Mt Bogong above it. The track is about 300 mm above the benchwork to allow for a trestle bridge ( to be built sometime in the future) as a feature.
The backdrop has been installed all the way to Geehi and has received several coats of white undercoat ready and waiting for a coat of blue.
The roadbed is now complete from the staging yard to Geehi as well and I am just waiting for an order of track to arrive so that track laying can commence.

The track in the staging yard has been laid. I used Micro Engineering Code 100 that I had left over from my original On30 layout. The foam road bed is from Trackrite and I have glued it to the bench work with no more gaps caulk. I also used the no more gaps to glue the track to it. It has the advantage that if I need to make changes I can peel the caulk off with no damage to either the track or foam. The white no more gaps looks a bit ugly but as  it is hidden staging it doesn't matter. If it had been visible track, I would have used a grey or brown colour and ballasted as I went. I still need to do the wiring which isn't one of my favourite jobs, but it needs to be done before work can start on Mt Bogong.
I have also been relaying the track on my original modules back to On30. I had lifted the original tracks and had laid On3 San Juan flex track and points. This time I am laying the Custom Trax flex track that I talked about in an earlier post. Nothing beats the look of real wood ties.

It has been a productive couple of weeks.





2 comments:

  1. Where's the bridge from? looks great!
    nick

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  2. Hi Nick, the bridge is a 120 ft truss pin bridge kit from John Paleki structures www.jpstructures.com It is a great kit very detailed and put together like the real thing with pins

    Cheers Murray

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