Basement Layout: Making Progress

While I'm not exactly as far along as I would have liked by now, I'm still enjoying working on the layout. I've been busy lately with making track plan changes and starting to lay some track and cork down. Now I just need to get out and buy enough track and turnouts to complete the mainline loop. That is my primary goal right now. Once I'm at that point, I can at least have some trains running again and then decided what to do next from there.

One thing I'd like to show here is what I am doing with the cork to differentiate between the main line and the sidings/yard area. Rather than using standard HO scale cork for everything, I've decided to go with N scale cork for the sidings/spurs and in the yard areas. This should give me a bit more of a prototypical look with the main line sitting just a bit higher than everything else.  

After I bought a few pieces of cork to get started, I realized that to make a 3 foot long section in N scale thickness, I can just take a third strip of N scale cork and put them all together. This turned out to be almost exactly the same width as the regular HO size, so I think I will go with this, at least for the lower sections of track that aren't grouped close together. For those areas, primarily the yard, I will probably have to go with sheet cork. 

Here is a look at how the three pieces of standard N scale cork line up with HO scale.

Comparison of three pieces of N scale cork and two pieces of HO scale cork.

I've also been working on some other small projects, one of which is figuring out what to do for the roads I need on my layout. I want something that looks good, but can be made from readily available materials. That led me to doing a quick YouTube search and I came across a great video from Gknos modeltrains. This video shows how roads can be made from simple foamcore poster board. I've been trying it out and have to say I like the results so far.

Messing around with some foamcore poster board to create roads and sidewalks.

For the main road section in the center, it is just a 3" wide strip of foamcore board with the paper removed from both sides and painted with some grey acrylic paint. The sidewalks are the same, only they are sitting up on a piece of thin foam sheet. This did a nice job of simulating the sidewalk being at curb height. The seams in the sidewalk were done by cutting slightly into the top surface with my xacto knife. Now it just needs some striping and weathering.

Office Shelf Layout Update

Progress has been relatively slow on this project, but with the way my schedule is right now I can only work on it late at night on the weekends, so I get maybe 4-6 hours a weekend to work on modeling projects. I'm not as far as I would like to be, but that's ok as long as I'm always moving at least a little bit forward.

Since my last update, I've gone ahead and glued the cork layer to the baseboard, finished painting the rear track, and almost completed the layout of the paved areas. What I've been doing for this is cutting layers of cardboard, from old cereal boxes, and stacking them up to be level with the top of the rails. There are six layers of cardboard and one layer of poster board, which is red because I happened to have that laying around in the basement. All it needs is a couple of coats of acrylic paint then it will look just like concrete.  

Layout of cardboard and poster board for the paved areas of the layout.

This layering technique for doing paved areas is not the most efficient, but it works for me and that's all that matters. To keep the layers together, I am just using an Elmer's glue stick. I haven't decided how to glue them to the cork just yet, maybe white glue will work. That won't happen for a while though so I can make sure I have the layout of the paved areas just right. I still need to add a location between the tracks on the left side for a loading dock and then another section crossing the tracks for forklift access to the dock.

A closeup look at the layered cardboard method I'm using for my paved areas.

I'm at the point now where I need to order a few things so I can keep going. I need the loading dock for between the tracks at a minimum and I'd like to get some other detail parts to combine shipping and have a few more options to play with for this layout. Below is a picture showing a couple of cars parked on the two tracks in front of the commissary building. The hammer is in there to help keep the corner of the cork down while the glue dried.

A quick mockup of two cars parked on the two tracks.

I'm hoping to get some more time in on the layout this weekend and maybe get the rest of the cardboard cut and glued together for the paved areas under the loading dock. Other than that I really need to think about gluing the track down so things don't move on me. The contour cut of the cardboard follows the track so I don't want that getting messed up.

Scratch Building Some Road Signs

Lately I've been thinking of ways I could scratch build some simple items for my office shelf layout and one of the easier things I came up with was to make some road signs. I will need at least two cross buck signs and maybe some other warning signs for the layout, so rather than pay to get a large pack of pre-made ones, I decided to try it for myself.

Some examples of the signs I wanted to try to make.

The first step was doing some research on how big these signs are in real life. After a bit of searching around, I found some good resources and decided to go with 36" diameter for the round yellow sign, 36" x 36" for the stop sign and approximately 50" x 50" for the cross buck. 

Once the sizes were determined, I found some good drawings of each sign online and copied them into my vector graphics program, Inkscape, and resized them to scale. Then it was as simple as creating a few copies of each then printing them on my home printer. I tried printing them on regular copy paper as well as some thicker fancy paper. The latter ended up being the better choice just for the rigidity of the end result. The copy paper just seemed to be too flimsy. Here is a look at one of the printouts.

A look at the printout with some signs already cut out.

One they were printed I just needed to cut out the shapes. The first one I tried was one of the round yellow signs with an xacto knife. That didn't work so well on the round shape so I did the other two with scissors and that seemed to work better. The stop signs were pretty easy, although I kind of messed up the first one and did not include the white trim. The cross buck proved to be difficult just because of the interior corners, but came out looking ok.

Once the sings were cut, I needed something to stick them to. For this I chose to use some 0.010" square brass rod from Hobby Lobby. The only thing I did was cut it to size and paint it silver using a metallic silver paint marker. I then glued the signs to the posts using an Elmer's glue stick. This seemed to work pretty well.

Then to address the issue of the backs being white from the paper, I first tried coloring them in with a silver colored pencil. This worked ok, but was not perfect. I then tired the same idea with the metallic paint marked and that came out much better. In the bottom picture the first two on the left are just the white paper, the two in the center are the colored pencil, and the two on the right are the metallic paint marker.

A look at the front of the first batch of signs.

A look at the back of the first batch of signs.

These turned out much better than I thought they would. There are some things I would like to improve for future attempts, but nothing too major. I think the best thing would be to find a way to cut the circle shapes in one cut with some kind of punch. That would get rid of the rough look to the overall shape.

Office Shelf Layout Update

Its been a while since my last update on this project as I haven't had much modeling time the last few weeks. I did manage to make some good progress in the last two weekends though. I now have the track almost completely painted and I've started building the foundation for the paved ares of the layout. Here is a look at the progress.

A look at the start of my paved areas on the layout.

A closeup look at my freshly painted track.

The front track is completely painted and now I just need to finish the rear track. It may be a lot of extra work, but I really like the look of the separately painted tie plates and rails. I used Rust-Oleum camouflage spray paint for the ties then went over the rails, spike heads and tie plates with Americana acrylic burnt umber. It may not be perfect, but it looks good enough for me. I've still got a lot to do, but things are slowly coming together now.

Track and Scenery Mock-Up for the Office Shelf Layout

Mock-ups are something that has become pretty common with my office shelf layout project. I've already done three for various structures and now I have one more to add to the list. This time I decided to mock up a section of track that would allow me to practice some techniques for a few things to be included on the layout.

The main goal for this mini project is to mock up the interface between the track and the paved areas. I've been tinkering with a few ideas and I think I've settled on leaving the track at a lower level and raising the paved areas to meet the top of the rails. I plan on modeling the paved areas with sheet styrene, so all I needed to do was find a proper material to raise the styrene off the surface just enough. That turned out to be N-scale cork. The other goal for this mini project is to try out some scenery techniques like applying fine turf in place of a grass sheet, track painting, and more ballasting. Below is a look at what I mocked up to get the height of the paved areas, loading dock, and track all correct relative to one another.

Mocking up the elevation of paved areas for the layout

Once I had that determined the next step was finding a small scrap piece of wood to use as a base for the mockup. That was pretty easy since I have a bunch of scrap boards laying around in the basement right now. I then took a couple of pieces of snap track that I already had painted and laid them in place. 

Starting to lay the track down.

Rather than waste perfectly good pieces of cork and styrene, I turned to old cereal boxes again and mocked up both by gluing layers together until reaching the proper thicknesses. I ended up gluing together five layers of cardboard to match the total combined thickness. 

Mocked up paved areas using old cereal boxes.

The next thing I did was attempt to lay down some fine turf in front of the tracks. I tried this with some Loctite spray adhesive and it seemed to work ok. I'll probably still have to seal it all in with a final spray of scenic cement just to be safe though. It just feels like some of the turf might come off easily right now. 

Starting to apply fine turf in the grassy areas.

After doing some more towards where the road would be, I decided I needed to get the cardboard pieces down and glued in place. Before that though, I went ahead and hit them with a coat of my Rust-Oleum grey primer to make it look more like actual concrete. Not perfect, but close enough.

A look at the painted cardboard piece just before being glued in place.

One other thing I wanted to do was blend the roadway into the surrounding ground level. To do that, I took some Drydex spackle I had laying around and applied some to each side of the roadway. I used the side of a piece of cardboard to level it off and blend everything out.

Applying spackle to blend the road into the surrounding area.

Once the spackle was dry, I went ahead and painted it the same brown color as the rest of the cork. This is the same color that I used in previous track and ballast mockups. Once that was done, I went ahead and repainted the paved areas with Model Master concrete color. It definitely came out looking better than the grey primer.

A look at the mockup with some more paint added. 

The next step after the concrete color paint dried was ballasting. I did this they same way I used on the other pieces of track I mocked up recently. I used the medium grey blend ballast and I think it looks pretty good.

A look at the ballast added to the mockup.

One other thing I did at this point was paint the rails with Model Master railroad tie brown. It was the closest I could find at the hobby shop to what I wanted so I just went with it. It doesn't look too bad, but definitely could use a little more rust color. I'll have to find something new for the actual layout or try to mix it with a rust color to get it just right.

A closeup look at the painted track with ballast added. 

Now all I need to do is add some earth color along the edge of the road that crosses the tracks then glue everything in place. I definitely like how this is turning out and plan to do the same for the actual layout. 

Track Painting and Ballast Update

I was finally able to lay down the rest of the track for my second trial piece for ballasting and painting. All I had to do was make about a 1 inch long piece that would extend from the end of the switch. I did this by cutting off part of a curved piece of track. Here's what it looked like before that small piece was added. 

A look at my second trial piece of track before adding the last small piece.

After adding that small piece, I glued it down in place with some gorilla glue, which definitely gives you a good hold for something like this. The next step was to finish ballasting the track. I used a medium grey blend ballast from Woodland Scenics this time around and I have to say it looks much better than the mixture I tried last time. Here is what it looked like after I was finished applying the ballast and gluing it in place.

A look at the track with all the ballast in place.

Now that I've tried out the grey blend ballast and have seen it used and recommended by a lot people on the internet, I think this will be what I end up using for my office shelf layout project. The next thing is finalizing what I want to do for painting the rails and ties. I think the rust color on the rails looks good, but may be a bit on the bright side, so I either need to play with darkening it up or going with a new paint altogether. If any one has suggestions or could share what they use I would really appreciate it. 

More Track Painting and Ballast Trials

I've been hard at work on these two sections of track for practice painting and ballasting for a couple of weeks now. It's a slow process because I find myself with very little time for modeling now that summer has arrived. When I do get time though, its full speed ahead with as many projects as I can handle. This one has been the primary lately and its actually been a lot of fun to work on. 

So far I have completed the straight section of track and have made good progress on the switch. At first I said I wouldn't post a picture of the ballast job on the first one, but now that I've been looking at it, I kind of like the color combination. To each their own, right? Here's what a 50/50 mix of Woodland Scenics medium dark brown and medium buff looks like. 

A look at my 50/50 mix of medium dark brown and medium buff ballast.

Here's another look with one of my boxcars just because.

While that one is not the best looking in the world, it definitely taught me a few things about track painting and ballasting that will help when it comes to building my office shelf layout. I think the most important thing I learned was just to take my time, especially when doing the painting. If you want something to look good, it requires patience and that's become pretty obvious through this process.

Now onto the switch. I took the same approach to painting this one and it took me a good couple of hours to complete the painting. I know that seems like a lot, but I want these to look just right, so I see it as time well spent.

A look at the painted switch track before starting the ballast work.

A look at the switch track after starting the ballast work.

I still have one more piece of track to create for this one so the upper left area runs out to the end of the board. I did this by custom cutting a couple of pieces of rail and manually placing some plastic ties I cut from remaining scrap track. It's a bit of tedious extra work, but make for much better looking track if you ask me. The only tricky part is figuring out what to do since I cannot place standard rail joiners in there anymore. 

I'll work on that problem when it comes to having a running train. The office shelf layout will be static, so I don't need to worry about the connectivity between rails just yet.

More Track Painting and Ballasting

I've made some more progress on the two sections of track I've been painting and ballasting for practice in preparation for building my office shelf layout. In my last post on the subject, I left off with the track painting nearly complete and some work started on the roadbed. This past weekend, I spent some of my free time working on on both and have a bit more to show for my efforts now. 

First I'll show the initial paint job on the track. It came out much better than I thought it would. There is a noticeable improvement over my last attempt at track painting. The difference maker is definitely the rust colored paint on the rails. It may have taken me an hour or two, but I made sure to include the tie plates when painting the rust color.

Fully painted rails, ties, and cork roadbed shown before cleaning the rail tops.

I thought about leaving the tops of the rails painted in the rust color, but decided against it in the end. Even though the shelf layout I'm building will not be powered, I don't want to get myself into a habit of doing something that would not work for a running layout. So I went ahead and cleaned off the tops of the rails to complete the look.

A look at my test section of track before applying ballast.

The next step was getting some ballast and applying it. I started with some Woodland Scenics medium buff ballast and that's what you see below. I thought it looked to uniform and bright to be very prototypical, so I decided to by some medium dark brown and mix them together. That didn't work so well and I won't even post any pics at this point because it just doesn't look that great. I think I really need to go with a grey blend and maybe mix in some of the buff or grey.

Starting to ballast the test section of track.

 While its back to the drawing board for my ballast work, I ran into another interesting problem with the switch that I am doing for the piece without the roadbed. I originally got this track dirt cheap and its pretty old and beat up, so I knew it might need some work. Well, in the spirit of making things look as real as possible, I found myself manually cutting and replacing the end ties and the two contact points for the wiring. It's a bit of tricky and delicate work, but completely worth it for the more prototypical look you can achieve by doing it. 

A look at my "Franken-track" with the end ties all replaced with ties from scrap track.

I've been calling this piece my "Franken-track" because its got pieces from two different manufactures, which is really only noticeable when you get in real close and look at the detail molded into the plastic ties themselves. From a distance, it looks great and will more than do for what I need. It's not shown in this picture, but I did go ahead and replace the two contact points with four new section of ties from a scrap piece of track. Now I just need to finish painting the ties and move onto painting the rails and tie plates.

More Track Painting and Ballast Trials

Now that I look back at the test track I painted and ballasted recently, I am not completely satisfied with the way it looks. I kind of took the easy path and just painted the ties and rails all the same color. It looks of from a distance, but when you get up close to it something is just a bit off. The other problem was going with the coarse ballast, it is just way too big to look anywhere near prototypical. All that being said, I've decided to go back and do a few more trial pieces with some new paint and smaller ballast.

I've actually started two more sample sections of track: one with cork roadbed and medium ballast, and one with no roadbed and medium ballast. I did this because I wanted to see the difference between the two so I know how to plan for building my office shelf layout. I plan on having an industrial siding of some kind, so I may need to go without roadbed if it looks good enough. Plus, practice makes perfect and these will help me improve my track skills.

Two new test tracks for painting and ballasting.

Along with trying out the smaller ballast, I went out and bought myself a bottle of rust colored paint from Testors for the rails. Last time around everything was all one color. This time I'm hoping the rust color will make the rails look more realistic. Below is a look at what I've done so far. I just need to remember to clean the tops of the rails now.

Trying out some rust colored paint on the rails.

One last thing I decided to do at the last minute was painting the cork roadbed with the same dark brown paint I've been using for the ties. I noticed  on the last test track piece that if the ballast is light in certain areas you can see some of the exposed cork. That is definitely not a prototypical looking material, so I figured painting it brown would make it more like earth underneath the ballast. This was just a quick experiment to see how it would look so I may have to find a better, more earthy looking paint to do more of this in the future.

Hopefully painting the roadbed will give it a more prototypical look when this one is complete.

I have some painting to finish up on both pieces of track then its time for ballasting. I'll try to get some updated pictures of the completed pieces once they are all set. I'm hoping this will help me make a decision on which method to go with for my office shelf layout. Not sure which will be better looking, so I'll have to wait and see.

Weathering Ballast

In my last post I mentioned how I thought the ballast I laid on my test piece of track was a bit too bright and unrealistic for my tastes. That was just a result of throwing down only one type of ballast, which was one of the brighter colors available. I also know that I should've gone with a smaller size, but there's not much to do about that now. For the coloring though, there is something I wanted to try: weathering. 

I did some searching around online and found that painting the ballast with a dark wash might give me what I was looking for. To do that I just needed to mix some black acrylic paint with water to dilute it. I read that a 10 to 1 ratio of water to paint would work best, so that's what I was shooting for. Once the mixture was ready, all I had to do was grab a small brush and start painting away.

Here is a picture of the ballast after I applied the dark wash:

Ballast and track after weathering and removing the paint from the top of the rails.

While there may not be a huge difference between the before and after, it's enough for me and looks pretty good. The only other thing I did was remove the brown paint from the top of the rails. There was just something a little off about having that, so I decided it had to go.

This is pretty much it for this thing for now. I may want to paint the wood base before using it as a display piece for my Santa Fe C44-9W as soon as I get all the pieces on it. I think that will look pretty good on my desk. Now I just need to find myself a Santa Fe boxcar to go along with it. 

Trying Out Some Ballast

One of things I wish I did was add ballast to my nursery wall layout project. I just left the track nailed down on top of the cork roadbed in the interest of saving time. It's not that it looks bad or anything, it's just not as realistic as I would've liked. That being said, I am going to make sure it is one of the things I include in my office shelf layout. Before jumping right into it for that project, I decided to make myself a quick section of track and roadbed mounted to piece of wood for some ballast practice. Plus it would work as a neat little display track for a locomotive and one piece of rolling stock, at least that's the plan for now. Here are some pictures of the ballasting process. 

Putting down the ballast proved to be pretty time consuming.

Here is a closer look at the ballast before gluing.

A look at the ballast soaked with my 50/50 mix of water and Elmer's glue.

The end result after the glue dried, not bad if you ask me.

A couple of things I've learned from this:

1) Coarse ballast is not the best choice for HO scale, it just looks a little too big if you ask me
2) I should've mixed in another color ballast, something darker, to make for a more prototypical look

There's really not much I can do about the fist thing, but I think I've found a solution for the second. Why not try to weather the ballast a bit and give it a more realistic look? I've been looking around online for techniques to do so and I think I will try using a dark wash to add some color. I'll try to do that here soon and get some more pics posted. 

Train Show Pickups: WGH on Tour Show in Novi, MI

So after a few months of looking forward to it, I made it out to the Word's Greatest Hobby on Tour show yesterday and the Suburban Collection Showplace in Novi, MI. I wasn't sure what to expect because this one seemed to be set up a bit differently than the train shows I'm accustomed to. Their website says, "the show is intended to introduce the general public to model railroading in an entertaining, lively and family-friendly atmosphere." 

I figured there would be more kids related stuff than a normal show, and there is nothing wrong with that, I just was out looking for the things I need specific to my projects and could've done without all the extras. I'm already into the hobby, so I could avoid any of the booths that were more of the introductory or informational type, but those are good for the hobby in general so I had no issue with them being there, other than maybe the extra volume of people there all day. 

Anyway, let's focus on what I did at the show now. After walking through the entire 100,000 square foot exhibit hall, I was surprised to see how few of the booths actually had a great selection of HO stuff that would work for any of my projects. As usual, I was on the lookout for any and all D&M stuff, but came across nothing this time. Beyond that there were some great booths for newer stuff from the big manufacturers, but nothing really caught my eye. 

My main goal was going to be getting some supplies for my office shelf layout, specifically some LH and RH turnouts and some ballast for completing my track setup. I managed to find both, at two separate booths. At one, which was a mix-bag of things from all scales along with other toys and junk, I managed to get ten used turnouts for $1 each. At another I grabbed a bag of coarse ballast to practice some different ballasting techniques. Finally, I came across a great deal on 12" x 36" sheets of cork roadbed, so I grabbed one just to have for future use. 

Ten used turnouts, a bag of ballast, and a 1' x 3' sheet of cork roadbed

So all in all, it was a decent show, but nowhere near as good as I expected it to be. I did come away with some good stuff to help keep me moving on my shelf layout, which is good, but I feel like I could've gotten the same kind of stuff from a smaller, more focused show that didn't cost $16 to get into. Anyway, I've got a few of these smaller shows to look forward to in the coming months, so hopefully I'll be able to check some of them out and get some more great stuff.

Nursery Wall Layout Update: End of the Line

It's a few weeks later than I originally had planned on, but now I can say I finally have the layout done and on the wall in the nursery. I'll admit I was kind of worried that it would not turn out like I wanted, but in the end it was perfect. It's nice to sit back and admire all the work that went into it now. Sure there are a few things I would do differently if I had the chance, but all that matters is what's done and what's done is pretty nice if you ask me.

This post will just be a lot of pictures of the layout. Up first are a few looks at the entire layout.

A look at the final layout mounted on the wall in our nursery

A straight on look at the full layout

One of the best parts has to be the repaints I did on the houses and church. I had never done any kind of model painting before so this was definitely a learning experience. It was a ton of fun though and the results were exactly what I was looking for. Here are some pictures of the two houses.

I love how the new paint makes this one standout from the background.

The yellow on this one came out looking spectacular.

A look at the small fenced in horse area.

One last look at the two houses together.

When it came to scenery for this one, trees were the easiest thing I could come up with. While I would've liked to have sunk all of them into the baseboard, it was just easier to glue most of them down. The only ones I did sink in were the Woodland Scenics trees I bought at the train show.

One of the pre-made trees I glued down to the grass mat

One of the Woodland Scenics trees I made from the kit I bought

The only structure I didn't do anything with was the station, although I did need to super glue a few pieces back together after dropping it on the table top. Besides, I liked the way the red goes with the yellow and blue of the two houses, so I saw no reason to change it.

A look at the passenger station and platform

Another look at the station and platform

The other structure on the layout, the church, is one that came out surprisingly nice. I wasn't sure on the paint scheme at first, but after getting into it the simple black and white was definitely the way to go. It looks classic and simple, exactly what we were going for with this project.

A nice view of the church sitting nicely on the hill I created.

A closeup look at the tunnel on the right end of the layout.

A closeup look at the tunnel on the left end of the layout.

The only thing left to take a closer look at is the train itself, the real centerpiece of the layout. It definitely fits the overall look we were going for with this layout. I really like the bright colors of the cars and the caboose I repainted.

A closer look at the train sitting in front of the church.

A closer look at the front of UP #4441.

One last look at the center piece of the layout.

So that's it. I had a lot of fun with this project and it's got me hooked on model railroading once again. Now I just need to decide what my next project is going to be. I'm leaning towards another static shelf layout like this due to time and space restrictions. I think a full table layout may still be a ways out for me, but you never know.