Scenic progress

With the last few days of annual leave coinciding with my son starting at daycare, the perfect opportunity arose to embed myself in the train room for a few days. While I haven't had Rozelle Street levels of progress, the layout has made a big leap forward.

With the alignment and location of uncouplers finalised through the operations session, I sealed around the Rapido uncouplers with some coloured caulk to make them less conspicuous after scenery is applied.

I then shaped the final styrofoam landform and fixed it to the layout with liquid nails.

The layout was now ready for painting. I've had some issues with the past with different types of spray paints 'eating' some styrofoam, so I masked the foam before spraying the sleepers and rails. The sleepers were sprayed with Fiddly Bits Grey Primer. 

Before I masked and sprayed the rails I tested the desired colour on the siding that is most going to be covered in filth and render whatever I spray unrecognisable - the coal siding.

For the rails I use Krylon brown. The ultra-flat application of this paint doesn't overpower the code 70 rail. Happy with the above result, I set about masking the rails with painters tape, which took around 2.5 hours.

The result is worth it I think. I intend to paint a number of the sleepers with varying colours to break of the uniformity of the light grey.

I then applied Spakfilla Rapid to the foam to start to get the landform, exactly as described in my previous posts about scenery on Rozelle Street. I used about 1.5 of the larger tubs for this one - significantly more than on RS!

In the coming days I need to start sanding the dried spakfilla and drawing in the strata shapes of the rockform. I plan on painting and weathering the rock exactly as on RS, however with some colour variations more typical of the Blue Mountains. I've found on recent trips to photograph the rock colours that underneath the layer of aged black there's a lot more orange woven through the sandstone yellow. I'm really looking forward to having a go of replicating it.

While I've been working on the layout this week, I've also laid a half-metre section of code 70 track on a board and treated it to the same sleeper and rail painting before trying each of those steps on the layout. Here's a preview of where I'm heading with the yard dirt:

I've been following a Victorian-themed layout on one of the Facebook groups recently where the owner has used coloured tile grout as the ground cover, with outstanding results. In the Jan 2021 issue of Model Railroader, there's also an article about using this material as ground cover. The above picture is the result of 1 part black, 2.5 parts light grey and 2 parts 'truffle' (an earthy brown colour). I'm using the Davco brand from Bunnings. I'm fairly happy with it so far but I'm going to keep playing around with colour variation. Hopefully the next installment on this blog will have a lot more progress in that direction.

Finally, if you're an AMRM reader you'll notice a familiar wagon and layout in one of the smaller articles in the February issue ;) It was nice to be asked if I could put something together, and it motivated me to finish weathering the bogies and wheels for the photo of the completed model. With limited time, sometimes it can be all too easy to punt the weathering of bogies off into the future, but they do form a crucial part of the overall weathering on our wagons and rollingstock and influence how you view the finished product.

Until next time, happy modelling!

Cheers,
Ben