Dan’s Train Blog

Mike recently commented on Nick’s next railroad and I wanted to respond in detail.

Dan, a couple questions for you. I recently got back into model rr after only doing it as a kid…and those were the days when we’d run them like racecars to see if we could get train cars to tip off the track around corners!

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So, I started from scratch and made a L-shape layout in a corner so far. It’s about 6 feet long on one wall and 8 feet on the adjacent wall.

Here’s my question.

I see that you use cork roadbed under your track. But What do you use for scenery ground? What I mean is this: do you glue the scenery to the plywood base, or do you use a styrofoam, or that putty compound?

If you use sytrofoam or something else, does it completely cover the plywood base, or do you use it only to attach certain scenery like a peg board?

Do these make sense? Please help…any helpful hints would be great!!!

I know there are much more complex ways to build layouts but bare plywood is a worthy start and I think it is super important to be able to actually achieve a certain level of “doneness” in the scant time modern life gives us and bare plywood is FAST.

I would use cork under the track. Next I would paint EVERYTHING (except the track!) with a coat of dirt colored paint.

Here’s Nick doing just that with his micro layout.

You can see two peanut butter jars full of two different colors of latex house paint. I get these colors by going to my local hardware store and they invariably have a stack of “rejects” where they mixed a can of color and the customer did not like it so they had to do another. They sell these for $5.00 a gallon. I look them over for a nice dirt brown/olive. I’d still buy a can at full price if they don’t have any rejects.

Anyway — paint over the whole layout with the base color so you cannot see any bare wood anymore.

Next I use a brown dirt-colored fine paper mache product mixed with real dirt and white glue to make a “mud” and paint this everywhere too.

To make hills you can build them up out of Styrofoam (very messy) or just use wads of paper and cover them with plaster cloth like Nick is doing here.

Then paint and mud the hill. Sprinkle real dirt and then glue it down by soaking with white-glue-water mix — with a few drops of Mr. Clean to break the surface tension so it soaks in better.

This makes a great “base” and then you can add rock castings, trees, grass, bushes as you go.

Keep an eye out for our next steps with Nick’s layout: we’re almost ready to build up the terrain.

David Lyman a.k.a. Dan D. Sparks posts a great description of how he makes and applies home-made decals to his Birney car project. Really nice work.

Photo by David Lyman, Dan D. Sparks

Finishing up!

Nick uses plaster-cloth to cover the hillside above the tunnel.

We painted and ballasted the track, added a retaining wall and added an initial layer of dirt-glue-celluclay ground cover.

Ready for trim: we cut some pieces to cover all four sides.

Gluing the trim.

Now for some grass and trees.

Pretty much finished.

Our one structure is an outhouse.

Continuing with construction of the bridge.

Using a “storey pole” marked with the locations of the bents, we shaped each bent pretty closely to the contour of the ground where they would be planted.

Then we glued the bents to the span — laid out upside down on the bench.

Once the glue dried a bit we set the bridge up and started gluing on teh cross braces. This really strengthens the bridge.

Finally we test fit the bridge in place.

Once the bridge was planted we soldered up the approach tracks and it’s time to test that track again!

Next we made some guard rails by shaping rails as if they were going to be frog rails and soldering them together.

All for now!

We started building out the bridge abutments by cutting away the Styrofoam and making a retaining wall out of scribed siding a stolen from an old Campbell tunnel portal kit.

Note that we pre-stained the wood with a simple ink-alcohol mix. Here’s the other side of the bridge.

The temptation to play with a train is just too much to resist!

We made little bents to go against the retaining boards glued earlier — the white glue is wet and still visible here.

We’re following the basic construction techniques of the Northwestern Pacific Railroad as seen in their Corte Madera Creek bridges since we can walk up and inspect them today.

Using six scale beams glued in two groups of three I made the main span and glued some Micro Engineering code 83 bridge track onto it.

In parallel while glue is drying we’re making more tunnel lining castings and painting the tunnel portal.

Using our jig we made the five trestle bents with profiles roughly matching the ground under them.

Continuing our build out of Nick’s HO micro layout.

Once the base was set up and roadbed established we started to build up the hill and tunnel out of 4″ thick Styrofoam.

We cut a mock tunnel portal for sizing.

Then we gave everything that would become “ground” a good coat of dirt-colored latex paint.

Then we started preparation for the installation of the trestle bridge by hot-knifing the end abutments and here I’m making a “story pole” that will be used as a template for the location and height of the bents. The track has been rough cut and painted but is not yet installed.

We used Micro Engineering code 83 flex track and here we’re preparing some matching Micro Engineering code 83 bridge flex track with appropriate ties and spacing.

To make the bents we made a jig into which 3/16″ dowels will be held while being glued.

While the glue dries on bent assemblies we started to make plaster molds of the tunnel interior using a Woodland Scenics mold.

Nick joined our “build stuff” group with no idea what he wanted to build. We suggested he look though our library of books and he saw my copy of Stindt’s “Northwestern Pacific Railroad” and started explaining to me that this was the railroad that used to run through our neigborhood.

This, I knew. What I had not known is that Nick was a rail fan.

We had Nick sort through and tag all the photos in the books he liked and ended up with a concept of a micro-layout with a tunnel and a bridge.  We had about 50 building hours available to us in the project series so things needed to be kept small and simple.

Nick tagged about 50 different photos and we scanned them quickly at low resolution so we could see them all together. We all saw that Nick was strongly attracted to tunnels and trestle bridges so I proposed a small diorama with a hill, creek bed, tunnel and a bridge.

To get things started we cut some plywood to define the footprint.

Although it is not my favorite technique, I had a lot of styrofoam around so we cut and built up layers of foam.

We marked where the tracks, bridge and tunnel would be. I suggested making the tracks “skewed” (not parallel) to the layout edge but Nick insisted he wanted it straight.

Pretty soon, we had something starting to look like a micro-layout.

I haven’t written much lately but I’ve been building a LOT. As I mentioned in July, We moved to a new house with a workshop . The plan was to use the shop space for the layout (of course) and a workshop space for model building.

So much for plans. We’ve started teaching “build stuff” workshops on weekends for
teenagers/young adults. We started with a three month class meeting for four hours on Saturdays. That filled so we added a Sunday section. The projects are really great and since part of what the kids are doing will be blogging about their work I’ll just show a sample of what they are doing and I’ll provide a link to their blogs once they are up.

Ian is building an Airbus 380 in 1/144 scale.

Nick is building a micro layout in HO with a bridge and tunnel – the only model railroad project!

Sarah is building a fantasy diorama of a bed flying over a city at night.

Peter is building a super complex Gundam kit with a bagillion pieces.

Phoebe is making a ¾” scale room box of a Vamire’s Steampunk style home.

We’re all taking turns practicing airbrush and other painting techniques on my old model of the Millennium Falcon.

Kris is building a 1/48 scale tank for a diorama.

Not pictured: Reggie’s free-lanced 12” Globe, Devon’s Manga stage model and Steven’s world of eraser people.

It’s a huge amount of work but also tremendous fun.