Tag Archives: Scenery

Great Scale Model Train Show

Always a treat to attend the GSMTS, in Timonium Md at the Maryland state fair grounds. Held Sat and Sun, Oct 25th & 26th at the 3-1/2 acre Cow Palace. – http://gsmts.com

Cow Palace @ Timonium

Some of my favorite dealers to visit,

Crusader Rail services – Scenic Express – Tichy Train Group – http://tichytraingroup.com, Motrak

Models –

Part of Scenic Express Display

Part of Crusader Rail services Display

Sorry Greenway products was not there as they always have lots of interesting and unusual detail items, and good buys on things like Classic metal works vehicles

Pop-up access scenery sections

Having made 4 pop-up areas in my layout for access to track etc, I made foam plugs to sit on strips in the access holes to support the scenery, or town, or hill. The foam is light and sturdy.

Layout of town on section

Here is the first section that will hold part of the town on my layout, in this case using a large sheet of styrene for the roads that lap over the joints of the plug to conceal it once settled into
the pop-up area.

Adding Styrene for roads and sidewalk

Access area to be filled with section

I also put some large bolts that will be hidden inside removable buildings, that make it very easy to lift the section from the area.

Setting section in place

Test fitting the soon to be town

New Log Cars

New log cars near the fishin’ hole, needing logs
Also the scenery around the area getting ready for grass, trees, and ferns

Making Conifers

Recently purchased a new tool and materials from Micro Mark, to create evergreen trees.
The idea is to run a bead of glue down a soft iron wire, then spread Chinese bristles relatively evenly along the wire, and let set up long enough to have the bristles tacked to the wire but not so long to adhere the wire and bristles to the wax paper they suggest you place under the wire.
Then you put another bead of glue on top of the bristles centered on the wire and add a second wire on the glue and let set for a time.
At this point you are ready to use the tool to do the next step.

I found this worked OK, but was a little awkward, seeing that the wire was just loose, and spreading the bristles on the glued wire tended to move the wire, and make the whole process a bit tentative, messy, and hard to keep the fibers where you wanted them.

So I decided to build a simple jig shown below to hold the wire in position during the gluing process, which I think really made the system work much better and with more control.

I’ll continue the process on the next post

Scenery Paint

A really good source for scenery paint is a service that both Lowes and Home Depot are offering. They sell samples of any of the hundreds of colors in their Valspar(Lowes) or Behr(Home Depot) lines at $3.00 ea. These samples are in handy screw top plastic containers of approx. 8 Oz.
That’s a whole lot more than typical railroad paint, or even the colors that are sold in the craft stores in 2oz containers.
I would not use these samples for painting anything that the much finer ground pigments of the true railroad colors would preserve detail, but for ground color, thinned for rock staining, etc and the fact that you can pick any one of the hundreds, or even thousands of chip colors displayed in the stores, and then they make the sample for you is just great.
Next post I’ll put up my first scenery using this paint and the Noch Gras Master

Sample paints