Progress on ground cover

The older you get, the more life keeps intervening in your valuable train time, yet I managed to get a solid day to work on the scenery over the Easter long weekend. Here's a sample of how it's looking now:

Since the last update I had finished toning down the rock colours to a darker shade, and am happy with where it is now. Onto more scenery!

The method I outlined in the last blog for track ballasting is the one I've adopted going forward; dried and sifted washed Sydney sand applied dry onto the track and shaped with a foam brush, then secured with iso followed by Luke Towan's scenic glue mix. After the below photo I reserved the eye-dropper for applying glue and just added the iso directly from the spray attachment on the bottle.

Below, the fuel siding with sand applied, ready for iso and glue. The flag is to mark where trees are going.

The current scenery layer was masked with the Sunday paper before spraying iso. Once that dried, I applied a blend of Davco grout colours to suit a dry, greyish ash ballast look, and then sprayed iso again followed by glue

I also applied the same method for the coal siding. For the regular scenery (i.e. away from the track) I've used Luke Towan's dirt method; 1 part sifted and dried backyard dirt mixed with 1 part of lighter brown grout, applied through an old stocking. For the coal siding I've amended the mix to 1 part black grout and 1 part dirt. Here it is when wet:

And here it is after drying. It does look a little darker in person, but I'm pretty happy with it. The colour will be more noticeable once I've finished the ground cover on the adjacent tracks.

Another shot of the fuel siding once dry:

An overall shot of the entry and fuel siding. The more scenery I get down on to the layout the more I feel like I'm closer to getting the layout to the idea of how it would shape up when first designing it. It's a good feeling!

Pretty happy with how the fruit siding is coming along too:

And as usual, the overall progress as of now.

Probably due to schedule another operations session soon, but I'm keen to race ahead with a little more scenery while I've got the time. I have a large amount of leave coming up mid-year, so I'm hoping to use it to finish all of the buildings, and build the overheads.

Until next time, cheers!
Ben