Leaving Home Ain't Easy

DB sadly draws conclusions from airborne experiments:

Landfill: Scenery removed and out for the worms

While in the land of the long white cloud, His Royal Druffness has just acquired a train room with attached house, up here in the Great Dandruffy North, we've just done the opposite.

It's quite a shock for two people to move - after having spent 12 years in a fairly roomy 4 bedroom house - to a tiny 1 bedroom apartment.

The physics of this transformation required the rapid expulsion of what seemed like several tonnes of accumulated rubbish; including the unceremonious trashing of my half-finished layout in the sky.

It was an interesting experiment, but even when accessed from an altitude of 6' 3, the idea of an 'above the doors' layout turned out to be a little impractical. While viewing it wasn't as bad as you might think, it's the operation, and ongoing maintenance that was always going to be extremely difficult.

The Big Gorge, stripped of scenery and nicely packaged for the trash man

Close, but no cigar.

Not that I wanted a cigar.

It was a bit sad making the decision to dump Moana, a layout section I really loved making and looking at. The scenery (and the goods shed for unknown reasons) was saved to be reincarnated in some other scene but its soulless shell was crushed by a passing garbage truck on Friday.

On the same day, I also separated from my modeling table (as featured in Great Workbenches of the World) for the past 22 years. Sigh.

Onwards and upwards.

[Aside] In case you were wondering what I was up to over the quiet months before I started attacking DJs and running my DXs, yes, I'd been playing with more N scale silliness. Here's my attempt at a 4-front windowed Canadian cab Dash 9 made from an SP kato -9 loco with an Atlas SD60M cab modified for 4 windows and fettled a little. Now in long term storage.

Something new for Steve4painting to roast 

BR4 - DIY Cardboard Recycling

DB says with greenliness:

The Broken River blob* continues its pathetic treck forward.

On Saturday I undercoated the area of the backdrop that was expected to be visible above the mountains and then followed that up with some 'Utah Sky'. Alas there were no 'Avoca Sky' test pots left in stock at the local hardware store. Close enough for a base I feel.

The next step was to put in some landforms so it will look like we're making some progress here. My intention was to use some of the various bits of NZ wire netting that have been under various layouts since the Casseolithic period becasue I like the way you can cut shape and fiddle with the stuff in real time to get the terrain you want. Unfortunately while this has always worked fine in the past for larger hills, on these small narrow cliffsides it was just making me grumpy, so I thought I'd give that cardboard lattice trick a try. Strangely enough, I don't think I've ever done this before.

A quick raid on the recycling bin uncovered some corrugated cardboad boxes and some lighter manila folders that might do the trick. These were cut up into strips approx 2cm wide.

The electric glue gun (what a marvellous invention) was then fired up and I quickly started sticking vertical mountain bones on, with the odd horizontal bit weaved in for good measure near the cliff top although I'm not sure they really added much value.

After some strips of the thin card were placed on the tracks to protect them from drippage, the hardshell went on. This job used to be pretty messy before before that Woodland Scenics plaster cloth of unknown flamability entered the market.

Suddenly things are starting to look partially half-arsed. I would have liked the cliffside to be taller, so I might nudge the track closer to the edge at the left side of the centre tunnel to allow that.
*bloody layout operational block

Broken River 3 - Some progress

DB reports on another adventure in the trainroom:

After that exciting Broken River prototype flyby in my last post, let's now return to 6 inches x 8 feet of sky-high reality.

Checking aroundabout where the Broken River left-end track should go to meet up with the yard points, I de-lifted the section down onto a set of drawers so that I could do some work on it.
The first item to be addressed was the join between the backscene panels, which are plywood sheets approx 4mm thick. I white-glued a small piece of the same material behind them and clamped this all together while it sets. I also ran some white glue down the join as a filler between the two pieces, although I expect that area of the backscene will be largely hidden by the middle tunnel in my group of three.

Recycled flextrack was then attached with the staplecannon and a few wagons were pushed over the joins to make sure everything was smooth. Being too lazy or incompetent to make my own track (and lets face it, for a layout at this height, why would I bother!) I cut the rails with pliers and then file any burrs off the tops, bottoms and the surfaces where the fishplates go (otherwise you end up fighting with them and don't get a great join). As I happen to be using code 55 Peco track - the one that has 'two webs'; the latter step means running a triangular file between the webs on each side of each rail.

I'm soldering about every second rail jointer (mainly because most of my old recycled track is two sections soldered together) and will be running copious wire jumpers to connect everything else to a thick bus wire running around the layout. Don't want things to be running erratically up in the sky.

DJ 3067 and DG 2376 run the first (unpowered, non-revenue) train of crusty old wagons to 'see how things will look'

Tunnel Vision - Revisiting the Broken River Gorge

DB hopes that writing this will spur him into action:

I put a lump of wood up in the sky a while back before becoming distracted by other things, but now that it is winter here up in the Top Half of the planet (albeit the mildest I've ever seen) I need a few indoor projects to get on with. And I wouldn't mind seeing a train run around the room under it's own digital steam either...

The Midland Line is a spectacular piece of railway, with the segment between Springfield and Cragieburn, and more specificly, between the coastal abutments of the Pattersons Creek and Slovens Creek viaducts being the most dramatic. While the area around Staircase and the viaducts are all well known, the few tunnel-encrusted kilometres alongside Broken River are less so - probably due both to their inaccessibility and often being bathed in shadow or tricky light; making photography difficult.

Other than the familiar triple tunnels scene below of course. Unfortunately I couldn't conjure up a train at the time of taking the real picture (but I was tempted to photoshop in my new NZ120 DG nose).

So this is kinda what I'm going for in a representative fashion. Something akin to the second shot I would be very happy with: the tunnel 15-14-13 straight section.

I'd quite like some snow but it's not really in keeping with the rest of the layout. Maybe at the far left end there could be some dregs before going into the tunnel leading to the 'fiddle yard' behind it.