Moana 11: Getting it up

DB finally says: It seems like forever since I last posted here (damn work) and even longer since the journey to Moana started, but tonight the whole 8 foot lump was lifted up onto its brackets.

Thanks to the foamboard construction, the whole thing is super light and could be hoisted up with one hand if it wasn't so long. It will be interesting to see if the thing warps at all over the hot and humid summer.

So the obvious question on everyone's keyboards would probably be - how silly would it be to have the track sitting about 6 and a half feet up in the air. Well here's the view from the far side of the room which is about 13x13 feet or so:
Note the green Flufosaurus from the Otaki to Cass exhibitions. And from up on a chair:Practical? well, we'll just have to see. Moana is quite a 'flat' scene with a lot of hills/trees etc in the way of a clear view, but the next modules are intended to be a little more ledgey (like the Manawatu Gorge) so it should be a little easier to see the trains while standing on Terra Shagpile. Now you know why I didn't model a third loop through the goods shed and insisted on a motorised point...

Now that the layout is up out of the way, it might be time to back up a miniskip and have a bit of a clean-out. Items of comic interest from right to left: exercise bike used to store track and safety vest, my private-label Spring/Summer collection, a Speights clock that my brother bought me 20 years ago, PC keyboard boxes full of NZ120 trains, the last piece of NZ wire-netting left in America, an incredibly messy modeling desk, a 9mm DG untouched from the last time you saw it, a temporary shelf with a nicely weathered BNSF patched SD40-2 on it (the DFT thanks you for your DCC decoder), the pink foamboard table that Moana has been sitting on, and the back of a tatty tan chair bought from Paraparam for $5 in 1990 that has been used for modeling ever since (making things, not posing) and also it would seem (based on the visible evidence) for painting lots of ceilings in shades of white.
While not everyone will be jumping in the air over high-rise layouts (except perhaps periodically to see if their train is still moving), I can see this sort of lightweight scenario thing working for the Fetid_Antler's 8 foot Patea quandary. If this was a stand-alone roundy/roundy, it could be brought down and placed on a bed or kitchen table and plugged in for a play when the family is out and then safely returned to this storage position in a minute.

Railfanning Moana

DB says: I was passing Moana in the Mini a few months back when the scanner blurted into life. Whoa Nellie! 180 time!

Approaching the station, the light was glinting nicely off a slowing train's HLC tarpaulins so I thought I'd stop at the southern end of town and take a shot. As often happens, I didn't manage to catch what I'd hoped for (but we can file that away for another expedition), and instead managed to snap a couple of other decent shots.

Here old DX 5448, which has been waiting for a year or more to get a Tranz Rail logo, and DC4939 head eastwards away from Moana with their train, carrying primarily the produce of Reefton.
That train ended up crossing another at Jacksons, so I scooted into another position up on the goods shed to record westbound DCP 4559 and DFT 7132 for posterity. The real 4559 has since been KiwiRailed.There's nothing like a nice day out in the sun and scenery chasing trains eh?

p.s. I'm sure you know this already, but clicking on the pictures in this blog will open them up full-size. These two are 1024 pixels wide, ideal for most computer wallpapers.

Moana 10: Do the Loco-motion

DB says: The sum of all fears. I hate soldering. I hate it with a passion. Moana has been stuck for months now waiting for some solder. Today I soldered.

Firstly, the Tortoise is pretty neat all wired up with a centre-off reversing switch to (temporarily) a 9v battery. I've used hidden rods to operate points before, but this is oodles better. It even sounds like a real point motor as it winds over. The downside is that I don't seem to be getting much life out of either of the sets of internal SPDT switches that can supposedly be used to direct power to the point frog. "Hmmm" and "bugger" in equal doses.

For the more mundane, I have a main bus wire with plain old stereo plugs at each end running the length of the module. I have feeds to the track at both ends (single track at the far end, and three tracks just beyond the view blocker in the staging yard) and many of the rail joints are soldered as well. My soldering isn't pretty, but it seems to have worked, as I dusted off my magic DCC box and managed to get a few things working in super smooth slo-mo.

Woohoo!

Now that's a reminder of how long I'd really been out of NZ120 - most of my stuff doesn't have decoders. Sure I had the two DFs working on the Sawyers Bay layout, but they're boxed away at the moment, so I reached for some more other items. DC 4939 works (barely) as does DBR 1213 but it still thinks it's 1267. So later I changed the decoder address but then found #13 is consisted. I need to clear out all the consists from my N scale American days...

My new KiwiRail DX doesn't have a decoder and I don't know if I have any that fit the new Atlas Dash 8 [have just checked on the interweb and supposedly the ones that fit the dash 8-40B's fit the C's as well (yay!)]. The new DFT didn't have a decoder either, but I was able to steal one from a passing Santa Fe SD40-2. It works beautifully. I love those Kato units - they run so smoothly and slowly.

So I guess one of my next tasks is to get a few more locos working.

On the plus side, with some new trees hiding the Tortoise (it's partially buried in the foam hard up against the backdrop and surrounded by the trees behind Rhys's shed), Moana is almost ready to be elevated to its rightful position and plugged into the staging yard. I really should buy some people for the platform, and I still haven't built what I assume was the old stationmaster's house between the station and that hut, but we're almost there.

I don't know whether I've disclosed the Moana module dimensions before: The visible area (seen in it's entirety in the wide angle shot taken at 24mm focal length above) is 210 cm long from the far edge to the view block that the camera is perched on. It's 53cm wide at the view block end under the camera and tapers down to just 33cm at the far end (just one foot one inch wide). Size isn't everything.

Moana 9: Cabbage Trees/Restless Natives

DB says: Every once and a while someone wanders into the hobby's consciousness and in their own quiet way, shake things up a bit for the better - the late Brian Cross and his RTV molding, John Agnew and his Railmaster kits, Lawrence Boul's meticulously detailed styrene models, Peter Ross' search for the perfect long grass and in our humble scale: the late, great John Rappard, who took NZ120 out of crazy-impossible-dreamland to show just how do-able and easy it could be.

Another name that has been cropping up of late is that of Mark Andrews, who is called 'Cabbage' for reasons I can't fathom. You may recognise his real name from recent etching/CAD articles in the NZ Model Railway Rag, his superb 1:64th Dubs A kitset, Evan's IA wagon that he helped turn into reality, or that nice ZH...

All gushing aside, an email arrived from him yesterday containing print-and-assemble flax bushes. Clever enough, but obviously aimed at the larger scales. My finger hovered over the delete button... but today I printed out a few, cut them out (I may need to see an optometrist after that episode) and stuck them together. They came out ok, but not great. I may have another go with the recommended green paper, of which I have none as the idea is better than my execution of it.

Despite my wish to get Moana up and running so I can work on something else, I went a bit crazy Nuw Zulunding it today. In Mark's honour: Cabbage trees. These were made from parts of the Woodland Scenics tree forms that are included in Fine Leaf Foliage packs . These are a bit short really, but they were to hand.

I wonder if anybody, anywhere in the world, has ever used these delightful two-dimensional forms (below) to make award-winning flat trees, such as you would if modeling the hillsides near Murupara that are thickly dotted with Flounder Pines. On the ends of these short trunky bits, which were washed with some thin gray paint, I added a blob of Silflor Buffalo Grass: the new wonder product. Pungas were made from little bits of fern stuck onto twigs with PVA - much easier than you'd think:
OK, so how does all of the above look when assembled? In the pic below you can see a punga in front of the AG van, a wee cabbage tree in front of the DF fuel tank and another to the right of the power pole, and some flaxes (bluey-green) in the foreground below the loco and another one extreme right. Not completely awful. A few fern fronds are also visible beside the track, but they are hard to see.Just to get even sillier, I remember Don Clements going on about toi tois (or toetoes if you prefer) many, many years ago (a picture of Don in Andrew Gorrie's neat spread in the latest Railfan). This was 1993 or so at the Hutt Valley club, where alternate meetings were spent cycling over the same two topics: modeling stations with 6 inch rusticated weatherboards, and toi tois. Now that I think about it, the toi tois were a side conversation and the rusticated weatherboards were the monthly topic for about three years.

To honour that memory, I used a clump of silflor and some toothbrush bristles dipped in PVA and then fine sawdust. The toi toi and a short cabbage tree are dwarfed by Rhys' cast resin hut. Might need to upscale the foliage... So it's all coming together, but as you can see, the station trackage still isn't in yet. It's about time I got that damn point motor working too.

Moana 8: Little Green Tufts of Silflor Everywhere

As a public service to the blog's vast viewership, I ordered some silly-expensive Silflor Prairie Tufts and Buffalo Grass a while back. They come in a fancy packages just like iPods do, although these are marginally cheaper at $21~25 USD. Cough cough.

Inside the package are two 'sleeves' of clear plastic, coated with blobs of sticky stuff, to which fibres of a grasslike appearance have been attached. Hmmm. So to install these grassoids, you 'wear' a sleeve of them around one hand, and in the other, use fine pliers or substantial tweezers, to pull off a clump (some are singles, some are clumps of clumps depending on how their glue landed on the clear stuff - you can break these multiclumps apart if desired), dab them in PVA, and add them to the layout. I like em. A lot.

I used one sleeve of "Late Summer Buffalo Grass" to do the scene shown here (maybe 2x3 feet) and its made a big impression on these eyes. As with most scenery products, you'll want stick to the more muted colours and avoid the bright-radioactive-green spring and summer editions of their products.

A couple of mocked up pictures...
.As an aside on the finer points of photographic technique, the picture of the sleeve and pliers above was taken with my camera hanging around my neck on 2 second self-timer, with a flash on top, pointing up at a 70cm long foamboard reflector held between my teeth. I must detail how more of these exquisitely crafted pictures are taken... :)

Moana 7: Back from the dead - track, ballast

It's been a long time since I last posted anything here. I could run through a list of excuses but at the end of the day they are just excuses: the truth is I've been stuck, and I still am, on a certain point. Or turnout or switch if you prefer. But I'd rather not get into that now...

I forced myself into the trainroom at gunpoint yesterday as if I don't so something Moana will get covered in cobwebs. So, lets get trackside. And to do that I'll need some track.

The track was soldered up and sprayed from the side with a spraycan of browny metal primer (except the point's delicate bits - they will be done by hand later). I like to solder up track into lengths as it lessens the risk of electrical problems later on and gives nice smooth joins on curves. I usually do a max of 2 metres at once - you need to leave some fishplated gaps in there to allow for for the natural expansion of track and baseboards as the heat and humidity changes throughout the year. I hate soldering, but striking while the iron was hot, I also put in a feeder to the froggy bits on my Peco electrofrog point. This is the one gripe I have with these points - about half of them end up stalling your locos on the frog and blades over time unless you keep everything spotless. Even that doesn't solve the problem always, so this time I'm taking no chances.

Track was then glued onto the cork roadbed with contact glue thus:
And I even used some thin styrene on the outside and weight on the inside to provide some Ghetto Superelevation.

After that had set nicely, I came back today to ballast. I quite like ballasting - even though I'm crap at that as well - as even if you do nothing else scenerywise, it makes a layout look so much more 'complete'. Adding ballast after the scenery, means you have to be careful not to flick it into all the crevices of your nice bushes with the thick brush used for shaping it, so due care was taken, and Mr Lux paid a visit afterwards to clean up any escapees. I used fine buff coloured stuff from Woodland Scenics out of my collection of half used bags, mixing in some dark cinders through the cutting at the left end of the module where I want things to fade away into the darkness. I used the old diluted-PVA-with-a-squirt-of-liquid-soap to stick things down after wetting the ballast with alcohol (isopropyl, not Jim Beam).

Once that was done, I used dabbing fingertips to clear off the tops of the sleepers and a fingernail to clear out the rail sides. I don't like the 'chip of ballast stuck on the side of the rail' look.
I liked that cork roadbed until yesterday, but it was a bear to cover up with ballast today as the glue mix tends to drag everything downhill and leave the top cork edge exposed. I should have brushed on some thick PVA first, but even then the watery glue would probably have caused that to run downhill as well. Maybe the solution is to brush on PVA, apply some ballast to the slope and shoulder edges, let that set overnight and then do the rest of the ballasting the next day.

And now the Axis of Evil:
I think I want this point motorised, so I've installed an old point motor, but somewhat foolishly, its not connected up yet. This is what's been holding me up for the last month as I don't think I've ever powered a point before.

Both I and Han Solo have a bad feeling about this.

Moana 6: Appetite for De Structure - The Station

DB says: I'd been putting the station off because I knew it would be hard. Right. Grimace and bear it.

I guessed the station size from pictures and the available space, and as such it's probably 2-3cm longer and a few mm higher than it should be, but I needed to do some backdrop hiding.

The main (long) side was cut out of a thickish piece of plasticard and a thinner body-double that would be laminated on top. The thin piece was scribed with 'boards' using a crusty knife and ruler (Rhys's 2mm scribed Evergreen styrene would have been helpful, but he refused to courier me some). When you scribe styrene, it starts to curl, so I roughly scribed the back of the thin sheet with boards as well, which balances out the stresses and causes the sheet to stop warping. I really should be an engineer with my impressive grasp of plastic particle physics.The approximate locations of windows and doors were penciled onto the 'outside sheet of boards' and cut out with my blunt knife. If you're following along at home, treat yourself to a fresh blade. Given that I'm not putting an interior in this, I used a black permanent marker to black out the window openings on the backing piece as it's much easier to do this now than to paint between all the window details once they are in place later on. The two halves were then stuck together and plasticard strip used to frame out windows and door frames. The doorway at the left was filled with some sort of thin pre-scribed wood sheety stuff, and the other two panel doors are thin plastic rectangles with panel holes cut out to reveal the thick plasticard backing sheet, giving a 3D look.End shapes were guestimated, scribed, and cut out of some thick styrene (corrugated as luck would have it - just some stuff that was begging to be used up) and then Moana could finally stand on her feet. Lazy fool that I am, I had no intention of making a backside to the station, but added a middle profile to keep the roof and verandah from sagging.Balsa was used for the sub-roof (isn't it funny that balsa, that most primitive and childlike of modelling substances, still plays such a vital part in my modeling?) and this was covered with the last of the overscale HO corrugated aluminium sheet left over from the goods shed. I needed to use two pieces here, one for each end, but the join is well hidden now that the paint is on. I used acrylic Flat Gull Gray (my favourite paint these days) for the walls, and some old Burlington Northern green darkened with a few blobs of black for the trim and roof. And that's that really. A wash of black acrylic was added to the roof to bring out the texture, and the 'Moana' lettering on the verandah was drawn in using a fine tipped permanent marker. I didn't say it was going to be pretty...
I suppose in hindsight I didn't need to put in as much heartburn over building and painting all that window framing as the side is barely visible, but on the other hand, at least now you won't be able to see what a bollocks I made of some of them either. There's always a silver lining...

The station is a little bit long, but that's OK. What's not is that while painting the thing, I made the mistake of Googling up some images of Moana (I was surprised how many are out there) and they revealed that the station has undergone some changes since the pictures in the Peter Hodge article were taken. The wooden door at the left side seems to have been covered up now as if it were never there, and some windows have appeared in that little protrusion at the left of the building. Ah well. The observant will also note that the goods shed isn't opposite the station where it's supposed to be - I wanted it closer to the footbridge to hide the 'tunnel' into the staging yard.

So at two days elapsed time and maybe, at a stretch, four hours of actual effort, that didn't take as long to give birth to as feared -I certainly spent a long time fretting about it. Quite a long ge-station you might say. You've been a great audience, and I'll be here all week.

Moana 5: Structurally Unsound

DB says: With the recent greenification of Moana, now would be a good time to make my first structures of this millenium. Yes, I'm a little rusty, and it shows, but we both know that if you were hoping to see works of art, you'd be on Leonardo DaVinci's blog and not this one.
The goods shed was formed in record time around a base of foamboard. Using a few pictures and some model wagons to guess the proportions, I cut out a floor and added walls and ends on top of this with PVA (contact glue will melt the foam in the foamboard edges). A roof of balsawood was stuck on top. In hindsight, now that it's finished, the roof pitch should be a tiny bit steeper, but there you have it.

Once the glue holding this core together had tacked a bit, some fairly fine HO scale corrugated aluminium sheet, which was found lurking in my bag of plasticard bits, was liberally applied to the the card sides of the foamboard on the visible north side, east end and the balsa roof using contact glue - one piece for each (Captain Obvious says: the one piece roof has a bend in it). As these were all big meaty shapes, I scribed in a couple of lengthwise 'join lines' on each with a knife and ruler to represent the layers of corrugated iron sheets, and not terribly well, I might add, as can be seen in the picture above.

The doors and a few bits of styrene strip were splashed on to make it look like some effort and more than ten minutes were expended constructing the shed and before everything had set, paint was already going on.

I used light gray with a few blobs of yellow in it to get the base cream colour first, and freight car brown for the door and some rust blobs. Once this had set, a wash of acrylic black brought out the corrugations, and later that evening, some light gray was drybrushed on the top of the walls to lighten things up a bit (the vertical picture in the previous Moana post shows it in the background in its darker state).

The west end (facing the staging yard) and the south side facing the station won't be visible unless you're trying really hard, and even then, only at an extreme angle, so they only received a rudimentary painting over the foamboard core (no cladding) as can be seen below. Why not do them properly you ask?

The seedy underbelly

My philosophy is that I'd rather steam through something and finish it to a reasonable standard and then get on to the next thing; than spend weeks agonising over perfecting it in the hope of an A+ mark but thus risking getting bogged down and never finishing anything. Either that or I'm lazy in a hyperactive kind of way.

Just in case you hadn't noticed, there's far too much to do in life and far too little time to do it in...

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You may recall from that last episode that I recommended the Journal's fine pictures of Moana. To record the correct Journal issue for that post I foolishly removed the magazine from the train room and then the next day had forgotten where I'd left it, so made this hash of an overbridge without pictures. Note to self: D'oh. The handrail posts are a bit widely spaced and a few details are a bit out, but luckily this won't be a terribly visible structure on the layout.

The hill it is resting on is a piece of foam painted dark colours (it will be hiding in the shadows behind the goods shed) and sprinkled with some superfine ground foam. The decks of the bridge are balsa, the pain in the patootie handrails are styrene strips, and the last of my 1:120 Preiser 1950s Slovakian Shipbuilders were added to add a little humanity. Oh the humanity.

In the next postcard from Moana: a station.

Moana 4: Nothing to see here. Carry on.

DB says: I've been putting in half an hour here and there on Moana this week, although progress has been less dramatic. Scenery danced its way to the far end of the boards and work has progressed on adding some structures. In the shot above you can see a goods shed (I may have to lighten it up a bit) and the balsa decks of a footbridge are barely visible under construction at the extreme end of the visible universe, being held in place by a colourful string of paint pots on the station platform.

The shots from the previous Moana blog post didn't really show the scenery well, but perhaps the distant trees in the following shot convey the effectiveness of the 'layered mixing it up' approach as discussed previously. The foreground needs some flaxes and DBR 1213/1267 is obviously having an identity crisis: Most of the blue background is an old Tehachapi backscene held up while the shot was clicking. This makes me wonder if I should have built a backdrop at this end as well, but the sky on the backscene to the right will continue down into the corner module and hopefully provide the same effect.

In this last shot below, work has started on the property in the middle of the pic adjacent to the points at the southwest end. Perhaps this was the station master's house in the good old days? A low weatherboard house will go in here and the fence is up already. Rather than make the dude's back shed, I employed one of Rhys's wee resin huts. I also produced my Modeller's License at this stage and added a trackside shelter and control box ex Rod Murgatroyd that have been sitting in my box of bits for quite some time. This week, an old flock of HO sheep were found wandering through one of my boxes of scenery, so after tailing them, they were put to work in the foreground mowing the grass in forced perspective. The foamboard station platform is just visible at back right, and one of the 'fancy houses' that Moana has become infested with in the last few years will be represented on the hill out of shot to the right: with a lovely view of the goods shed. I think this will be the first layout/module I've built where the rails and ballast will be the last thing to be added - track here is dummied up for the pictures and to test clearances.

Incidentally, although I have taken quite a few pictures of Moana, for the structures I've been referring extensively to the 'Station File: Moana' article in the Feb 1996 Journal, penned by the late Peter Hodge who was one of the great gentlemen of the hobby in NZ. I have about half the Journals going back to the late 1980s and they really are a mine of useful pictures, plans and information. One of these days I'm going to have to rejoin the NZ Model Railway Druids Guild.

Moana 3: Going Green

DB says: Going green seems to be the trendy thing to do these days, so today I'll put some green on top of the white and pink lakescape of Moana. But first, let's deal to those pesky backdrops. I purchased a kiddies paint set and started mixing up dark greens to cover the red or yellow tints. If you're a bumbling idiot like me and have ever tried mixing paints to get an exact match, you'll know its a pretty hopeless task - even getting paint mixed at a proper paint shop with a photospectrometer can be touch and go. That's why car painters invented panel joins and blending airbrushes. Just when all seemed lost, the day was saved by a thin wash of black on the photo printed hills, which to my surprise, toned down the tints quite well. I managed to have more success as a mixmaster on the lake, where I was able to concoct credible combinations of cyan, blue, purple, white and black to represent the watery shades. All washed on thinly with some water so as not to obscure all the detail. And gently of course, as I didn't want to upset my cheap and nasty matte photopaper 'canvas'.
I also touched up a habndful of joins where the pages of hills didn't quite match particularly at the northeast corner of the layout (below) where I had borrowed a hill (from the middle of the real lake) to be the right hand end of the backdrop. This didn't match up well colourwise, but a wash of black on the bright bits and daubbling in some trees and such across the join, blended it reasonably well. The train will disappear under the pedestrian overbridge here and vanish into the staging yard. This photo sponsored by the healthy delights manufactured by the Coca Cola Chemical Corporation.
As can be seen from the second image in this post (a couple above), I'd previously undercoated most of the plaster hills a browny shade, especially on the sloped bits, as I don't want pure white plaster showing through any holes in the scenery. I used spray paint a few years back, but it's just as fast, cheaper, more environmentally friendly (after all, this is a 'green' post!) and less mind-altering to use some brown, black or grey acrylic paint and a big old brush. A little water helps the paint find all the nooks and crannies, and makes it go further.

On top of this, PVA is brushed on and some sort of 'base' layer is added. I mainly use Woodland Scenics fine turf mixed in with other things (more on that in a sec) for this. I think with all scenery, it's important to provide 3D 'layers' and mix things up with different colours, shades and textures, just like they did when they built the real planet. I lay newspaper on the floor under the layout at this stage and anything (anything) that falls onto it is dumped into a bag and used on future projects - its gives a nice varied base. In the cutting there are some small stones and even some coal chunks, but you'll not notice them on the finished layout unless you get your magnifying glass out. Normally I'd brush some plaster on the cutting's faces for texture, but on the Coast, cuttings seem to grow over pretty quickly with green things, so I didn't bother.
This base is covered with diluted PVA that is either sprayed or dribbled on, depending on the terrain. As you probably well-know, on steep slopes, dribbling the glue on leaves you with scenery snowballs running down the hills. So you can spray a mix of 'wet' water or alcohol on and then dribble, but I say: why not just brush on PVA, apply the scenery and then spray on the 'wet' glue. 'Wet' meaning with a little liquid soap/detergent or something in it to break the surface tension of the water which helps it soak in, rather than blobbing up on the surface.

Then its Tree Time, (the next layer). I saved a lot of trees from the Tehachapi layout, and these two particularly odd Busch specimens were installed across the tracks from each other first (above) so I could then hide them. They were blended (again above) with some of that ugly rubberised lichen (remember when that was all the rage in model scenery thirty years ago? Well, I still have half a bag left), and 'clump foliage'. After rubber lichen was cool, along came ground foam, and then those mats of foliage that you can tease out. Around that time, clump foliage was hip too, and I'm a huge fan of it in the 'burnt grass' colour. Now, fast forward to the new millenium, and Fine Leaf Foliage in 'dead' and 'light green' is the must have item. I love these wee trees, as they really make things see-through and three dimensional.
Planting is occurring above - a hole is punched in the scenery with a dental prodder and PVA then applied to the trunk. I sometimes use fine pliers to plant the tree if its a tricky to access spot, but you have to be careful as the trunks are fragile. Don't remove the holemaker until you're ready to plant, or you'll never find the hole again. Interestingly, all the trees in this blog post came off the Tehachapi layout, as did all the clump foliage, which in turn came off my old 3x6 foot NZ120 layout and a Wellington layout before that. No point in throwing these things away...
So that's the southwest corner completed, and now the swamp is being tackled (above) by recycling some of the deserty scenes off the Tehachapi layout (I really had no idea why I saved these patches until today). They are being held down as they're glued into the swampy area, and I think I might just get away with it with a few flaxes and cabbage trees added later...
Ta-da. When the white blobs on those trees dry, that will be two thirds of an 8 foot long module quickly and easily scenicked in less than three hours of elapsed time. And almost all of the scenery was recycled and reused from old layouts. Truly going green.

Moana 2: Backdroppin'

DB says: I wasn't going to make the same mistake I made with the Tehachapi layout backdrop's fabulous 90 degree sky joins, so decided to cove the backdrop joins (cove? sounds more like a pirate word).

I applied some quite thin styrene sheet, held in place with pins while the glue dried, before hiding the pink [pauses for Beavis and Butthead interjection] with some white paint. I'd wanted to use photo backdrops on the Sawyers Bay layout, but with that no more, and buoyed by ECMT's instamodule success, I was keen to try them here, having snapped a bunch of shots from Moana earlier in the year for such an occasion. A little careful printing produced something that looked like it might work:
Initially I felt the mountains should be taller, but after putting a loco on the track and applying an eyeball, I think it's about right. I also had to bear in mind that there will be low viewing angles involved. Skies were brutally amputated from the pics with a sharp knife blade.

In the pic below, the first layer of blue has been applied (using what may have been the prototype for the world's first paintbrush) which barely covers the white. Next time I'd just do straight blue rather than starting with neutral white as it took multiple coats to cover. As you can see, Woodland Scenics (or similar) Plastercloth hills started to form at this stage over wire netting. Best to get some of the messy stuff out of the way before the backdrop is done and the track laid.
After a couple of goes, I managed to lighten the backdrop sufficiently with thin layers of almost-drybrushed white (keeping things lighter closer to the horizon) applied with a fresh brush. I really should have a little more cyan in the sky, but after holding a vote with myself, it was agreed that I could live with this and started attaching pictures with gusto and PVA. Of course, things couldn't possibly continue to go as swimmingly as they had been :Well, its OK from a distance, but there is still quite a lot of work to be done. The problem isn't the joins or white paper edge on top of the mountains - which can be fairly easily dealt with - but in the colours, which looked fine when I was printing them out (of course), but now they look a bit red in places, a bit yellow in places. The main batch were 'developed' to a consistent formula in photoshop, but a couple weren't. I thought I got them fairly close, but they are a bit off. The 'proper' way to do it, once the printing scale was figured out, would be to stitch them all together on the computer, process the colors on that file and then get someone with a nice big printer to print the whole panorama out on one long roll of paper. Still, a worthwhile experiment I feel, and all is not lost, for tomorrow I'm going to buy a beret and a cape together with some watercolours, and then cut off my ear, as I think this can be salvaged with a little artistic daubbling. A word that I just invented.

There was something in the air that night….

…the stars were bright, Fernando…

DB Says: Despite the encroachment of gray hair onto a once fertile dome, I’m a bit young to remember the ABBA craze. But that doesn’t matter because we all know their songs - you could say they’re as popular now as ever. The same could be said for layouts that run around rooms above doors, they’re also as popular as they ever were, which is to say, not at all.

So you may be wondering, dear reader, why a moderately sane person is still flirting with such madness.

Mainly, because it’s the only way I can fit a decent length of track into a fairly small room that has far too many useful doors, windows and wardrobes in it to be an ideal trainroom. As for the viewing problem, I have to admit that Moana, which I’ve fallen in love with over the past 5 years, is only going to work when viewed from standing on a chair. Same with the staging yard, although as I’ve said before, I’m not going to be spending much time in there shuffling identical looking coal trains about.

Luckily however, the midland line (which apparently is now called ‘The Coal Route’™) has your veritable boatload of other scenes that ‘work’ from a low viewpoint – especially the viaducts and clifftop running between Staircase and Cragieburn.

Right, I’m sick of defending my stupidity to you both. Once I have a bee in my bonnet it isn’t going away until it stings me - so lets make some stuff.

This layout is going to be a modular layout (or more properly, 'sectional', I suppose). This way it can move if need be and could be re-assembled at the first USA NZ120 convention or other exhibitions. Most importantly, it will be in parts so the bits can be brought down to a more sensible height to be worked on. This is important, because scenicking it while standing on a stool is going to get old real fast, ergo things are going to have to be light and portable.

As for material, big 8x2 sheets of pink insulation foam are light, strong, seem to do well across ranges of heat and humidity, and they're easy to work with. A public service announcement: MR rag recommends the use of the pink or blue stuff rather than the white bubbly polystyrene which is quite flammable. I bought 2 inch thick slabs for bases and some one inch stuff for backdrops and other bits. A little cutting and gluing later, we have the result as seen in the above picture.

Or from a more accessible height, since foam layouts are so easily moved around:
The plan here (the tracks and other items are just plopped into place to see how things will look) is to make Moana with my favourite curve at the near end, swamp and lake at left, with the station behind it against the backdrop, the trains disappearing under the overbridge to the staging yard. There will be a slight hill where the glue gun is so the viewer will look down into that scene rather than sneaking a look from too close to the hole in the backdrop that leads to the staging yard. In case you are wondering why the main backscene continues beyond that point into the staging yard, its to give strength to the main foam base, which site on only two wall brackets. If you weren't, sorry for wasting a few more seconds of your day.Lets look at a couple of prototype pics to clarify the the intention. Firstly, here's a view (above) from a similar position to the Pink Elephant above. The station building is way in the background.Next, here's a view from almost the same spot, looking the other way - i.e the left half of the module, looking straight across the curve to the backdrop. The trees at left hide the join with the next module. The flax-filled swamp is behind the tracks and will run up to the backdrop to avoid any nasty lake-joins at that spot. Note that the track is on a slight embankment, which I might pump up a few mm to make the train more visible from standing-on-carpet level at this spot.
Lastly, the above pic is an overall shot of the other end of Moana (as seen from above the staging yard) taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and vertically compressed in Photoshop, so the train is missing a few slices. I've marked the relevant features on it and there will be a test in the morning. Not sure whether that made things any clearer at all...