Added more trees at Ruston

Nothing special to report, just added a few more trees at Ruston. 

Played around with the new camera phone.

Super Tree conservation

Even in a hobby, conservation serves an important role. 

So after working on a batch of Super Trees, do you find yourself with a pile of smaller pieces that are almost too small to make use of but you hate to see go to waste?

Well after pruning my last batch I wound up with a decent pile of small bits and pieces.  First thought was to gather them up and crush them into a useful byproduct for ground cover.   After getting them into that pile, I got an idea!

Why not spray the pile with an adhesive so they hold that shape and then cover them with ground foam?  I think they'd look like thickets?  At least that is pretty much what I've determined Woodland Scenics Briar Patches are made from? 

So I grabbed some hair spray and gave them a heavy coat, and just like hair, it held its shape. 

Then I sprayed them with a coat of Krylon Dark Camo Brown and let it dry.  This increased the hold of the shape.

Next I sprayed a coat of Spray Adhesive and sprinkled on several shades of fine green ground foam and sealed it again with a liberal coat of hair spray and Viola!  Instant thickets!

Who knows, I may not be the first one to do this, but I like it!  Cheap thickets, almost zero waste of the Super Trees and you get a nice looking byproduct.  You can leave it in one big mass as I did, or it can be cut or torn into smaller pieces.

On this day, let us not forget the more than 2,300 U.S. servicemen who lost their lives at Pearl Harbor 83 years ago.

December 7th, 1941

Fuller tree lines

I made more of the thickets and briars and added them to the tree line.

Super Trees are awesome but the only slight drawback to them are the trunks. Even in N scale they can look spindly and malnourished. What I've done in the past is to build up different types of vegetation to help hide the trunks. Which in the wild, rural areas is not uncommon. A stand of trees in the rural areas are not manicured to the extent as they are in urban areas, so the underbrush grows untouched and fills in the tree line. Thus resulting in what looks like a solid mass of trees.

In this wider shot you can see about 4 or 5 different types of undergrowth: The home made thickets, Woodland Scenics clump foliage, several of the bushes with and without the white flowers, bits and pieces of broken off Super Trees that I flocked. Then on top of the static grass, I threw down several colors of course ground foam, followed by several colors of fine ground foam.

Briar Patch and Thickets

I'm always looking for some new variation of vegetation to add to a scene, IMO the more you have, the less your eyes will see a repeating pattern.

On a recent trip to the hobby shop, I came across a product from Woodland Scenics called Briar Patch, which is supposed to resemble thick and or thorny bushes.  I thought this would be a nice addition to the bog scene, so I grabbed a pack of it.  I think it was about $9 each.

After getting it home and inspecting it, it looked like it was made from chunks of Super Trees with ground foam glued to it.  Simple enough.  It was tightly packed and was rather brittle.  While trying to break/cut off a section, it wanted to crumble quite a bit.  My first thought was that I could replicate this fairly easily by using a course furnace filter for much cheaper?

After digging through my scenery supplies I found a package of  Natural Aire filter that I picked up a while back for another project.  This should work nicely?

I cut off a small section to start with.  There's a backing screen that helps hold the filter together, this I removed by simply peeling it off.

I cut the strip into a small block and stretched it out thin then squashed it into a bush like shape and sprayed it with Krylon Dark Camo Brown paint (which was close at hand) so it was brown and not green.

While the paint was still wet, I applied a good coating of some fine burnt green or late summer ground foam to cover the filter fibers and shook off the excess.  Next I sprayed it with a good coat of cheap hair spray and sprinkled on a light amount of some brighter green ground foam for a variance of colors (I do not like a monotone look for vegetation) and shot it again with the hair spray to lock it all in place.

Once dry, I trimmed it up and placed it in the scene up against the base of the tree line.  I'll add some smaller bits and pieces of foam to help add layers to the scene.   

 

Trees of the bog

Today I got the static grass applied to both sides of the track that runs behind the bog so that I could finally start planting some trees against the backdrop.  Wanted to get these in before I started working on the trees that’ll be in the foreground.

Luckily I had enough trees left over from the Whitewater Creek scene to cover  the majority of the area.  With a lot of open spaces between the larger trees, I started filling in with some leftover Super Tree pieces that I removed while planting them.

That still left a lot of open area space at the base so I started making some brambles and will eventually work in some smaller vegetation and some poly fiber bushes to give the tree base a fuller, thicker look.    

The bog continues to green up

A few weeks ago after performing an update on my computer, it gave me the double barrel middle fingers!  Turns out the Bios became corrupt and then I spent another weekend getting up and running again after the repair.

In the meantime, while trying to stave off the withdrawals, I continued to work on the bog adding most of the vegetation around the shoreline.  As of this post, 90% of it is done.  I still have to apply static grass on both sides of the track and start adding trees around as well as some dead trees and rotting stumps in the bog.

I plan to add a small cabin and an old boat dock where there is still bare earth.

    

Bog vegetation

Ok, I went down after all the ghouls and goblins went home tonight and played around with the first little section.

I applied the glue base then placed the dark green tufts around the edges.

Hard to see but I did add some lighter colored tufts towards the middle and rear.

The large white flowered shrub is something I got from Scenic Express made by Martin Welberg. Before adding it I misted it with hairspray and sprinkled on some Woodland Scenics white flowers.

Next I mixed some 4mm dark green and 6mm autumn grass and applied very heavy around the entire area and sucked up the excess.  I then sprinkled on a variety of fine green ground foam and misted it all with more hairspray.

Before it dried, I lightly applied some Woodland Scenics yellow and purple flowers.  Then added some small bits of clump foliage and the Woodland Scenics Tall Grass and misted more hairspray to lock stuff in place.

I'm not sure how deep I'll pour the water, but it should be at least halfway up the edges.  This is just the undergrowth, I plan to add more small shrubs, trees and stumps along with some 12mm tufts to the bog bottom around the edges.

Tufts, tufts and more tufts for the bog

I know I know.....

There've a been a bazillion static grass tuft "How To's" posted over the years, but a friend asked me how I did mine to get them looking full and not chincy looking.  So I took a few pics when a did a batch, hopefully these pics will explain it better.

These tufts happened to be made using a lighter color so I had some color variation.  For these I started with some Silflor 6.5mm Late Summer and Autumn grass. 

Then I mixed it into the hopper, roughly in a 2pt Autumn to 1pt Late Summer mix.

Next I started applying the glue dots to the Non Stick pans.

Next I applied the negative clip to the tray and started shaking the grass onto the dots, and continued until they were fully coated, then I moved the static tool above the grass back and forth keeping it about 1/2" above the dots.  This helped to move the grass some more and keep it standing upright.  

Then I shook the tray so that the excess moved around the dots even more.  After that I turned the tray upside down and tapped the edges slightly to knock off as much grass as I could.  

Then I reapplied the negative clip and repeated the whole process.  After that I laid the trays upside down so that gravity helped to keep the grass from laying down as much as possible.   

This is how they turned out, nice and full!

This is about what 12 trays have made for me so far, and I think I still need more?  If I had to buy this many, I would have had to take out a loan...

The Bog gets some weeds

Starting to play around with the static weed tufts for the bog.  One tray is 12mm Dark Green and the other is 7mm Dark Green.   The 12mm isn't wanting to stand up as well as the 7mm.  Gonna play around with different glue mixtures.  Lots and lots to make...

But it's a start.

These are just set in place and not glued yet.  Most will be glued to the raised areas, some will be glued to the bog bottom.

The Bog gets some color

After waiting 24 hours for the Sculptamold to dry, I dug out the brushes and paints, and then I got the bog area painted with the base colors.  The surrounding area got a coat of my earth brown latex and the bog bottom was made by mixing some chocolate brown, with a drop of black, orange and yellow craft paints.

As Grant mentioned in his video, when painting the bog bottom while the earth edges are still wet, it might mix a bit, but this will just add to the bottom to show a bit of depth change. He was right. However, this might be all for not. 

By the time I get the tinted water poured and try applying some ground foam around the shoreline for algae bloom, most of the color will probably get covered up? But hey, why not shoot for it?

The Bog takes shape

I found a little time to work on the bog this week.  First thing I did was to repaint the backdrop, paint some new clouds and then added the tree line and then painted the MDF bottom.

Next I got the shoreline and islands created using Sculptamold.  Once this stuff dries I'll get it painted and then I can start working on the details like grass, weeds and stumps.

Louisiana Bayous

Ok, maybe not a bayou, maybe more like a bog...

As I continue working on the layout I find it changing a lot more than I had originally anticipated, but this is a good thing.  

Recently while working on the highway crossing at Ruston and getting the scenery roughed in, I started thinking about having something different than typical forested areas.  In this case to the right side of the highway behind the tracks the scenery begins to rise up to some low lying hills that I installed so I could have the farm scene above track level.  To the left of the highway behind the tracks, I'm planning to leave it a somewhat flat, wooded area.  To the right of the highway in front of the tracks I wanted a county road that leads to the Ruston depot and parking lot where I can unload hoppers of Lime for the local farmers.

That left the remaining front corner to the left of the highway.  My first thought was to dig out the ceiling tile and foam to make a depression that was lower than the other areas which would help define a natural transformation to the low hills.  This sounded good.

As I thought about more, I thought it might be a good place to put a low bridge or even a culvert, but both would mean that I'd have to continue this behind the tracks and for reasons yet not discussed, this might not work well for what I have planned with the woods back there.

The other night while surfing the web, a video popped up from a modeler that I enjoy following.  He's made a lot of videos on his N scale Southern Alberta layout.  The one that popped up in my feed was how he made a marsh or wetland!  This would work and would fit into my local.

The other nice thing about this idea is it would serve double duty, similar to the way my Whitewater Creek scene did.  Not only did fit the local, but it also served as a scenic divider between Fordyce and Haskell.  I've also been planning to redo the tracks and shrinking the footprint of Dubach eventually.

Here's kind of what I have in mind.

In order to do this, I would need to remove a section of the ceiling tile, which is 5/8" thick and I then install a solid base, which for this I chose a section of 1/4" MDF.  This will give me a solid, flat surface that I can paint and then apply the sculptamold over that I'll use to form the edges and small exposed islands of the bog.

I cleaned off the area and quickly sketched out the bog.

Next I used several sheets of paper and taped them together to create a pattern and transferred to the MDF and cut it.  Then I laid the MDF on the area and traced around it and removed the ceiling tile.

After removing the ceiling tile, I glued the MDF in place.  This left the MDF about 3/8" below the ceiling tile.  

Before applying the Sculptamold, I'll need to paint the MDF with a deep dark blackish brown for the color of the bog water.  I'm also going to need to get the backdrop painted as well.

More roadwork in Ruston

Had an extra day this weekend to myself.

I worked on the layout a bit but didn't make a ton of progress.

Got the shoulders and the edges of the highway and the country road filled in with ballast so as to make a transition.

Also got the breakaway bases for the signals mounted and then built up a couple of small mounds for them.

Once the glue was dried, I covered everything in grout and got it all glued down.

Then managed to get a base of scenery in place.

Finally I ran a train through it.

Louisiana DOTD

I gotta say them boys did a fine job and was quick.

After getting the cork fit and glued in place around the depot and parking lot I went back upstairs to work  on some other items.  About four hours later I went back down to see how it turned out.  Gotta say I was surprised at what I found.  I think I actually found another reason why layouts are considered never finished.

After getting it glued in place I found several things with some weight to help keep it flat while the glue dried.  I used a bag of birdshot and a couple of new bottles of 91% alcohol.  Everything had more than enough weight to keep the cork flat and that worked great.

But for some reason, both new bottles of alcohol decided to leak a little bit while laying on their sides, one on the cork the other was right over my new highway!

First, here's the new cork glued in place.

I didn't get a pic of the actual puddle, but I did get one of the aftermath and the repairs.

The first pic was after wiping most of the gunk off the surface.  It took everything off except the auto primer that I used for a base coat: acrylic paint, pan pastels, Dullcote and the Tru-Color paint I used on the lines.  First thought was to try and weather it and blend it back in, but quickly decided to repaint it and try to make it look like a newer concrete repair.

Cleaned and feathered the edges

Masked it off and painted it with a lighter color.

I followed the same method that I did originally, painted it, painted the stripes, added tar lines around the edges,  then weathered it slightly for a look of a little use.  

Overall I think it turned out ok and now the road kind of has a backstory to go with it.

Now I can proceed with the work of getting the crossing signals installed.