Terrafoaming on the farm

This long holiday weekend gave the time to start working on carving the foam.

I still have a lot of things to do here yet like filling in the cracks and joint with spackling.  Then painting the foam with an earth latex.  But before I start applying the base ground foam, I do want to repaint the backdrop and with another coat of sky blue and redo the clouds while I'm at it.

It's amazing what a little carving has done for the area.

Before

After

The foam at the left end will be shaped to accept a road which will disappear behind the hill.

That open space in the middle will be a railroad supply dump.

The small section of foam behind the track needs to be carved still.

Hopefully there will be a pond when I'm done here.  The large monolith to the right is a mirror, which I hope will give the impression that the tracks continue through the trees.

The small bumps on the right is there to give the landscape some unevenness.  Trees there and on top of the foam will hopefully help hide the pass through hole.

Looks so much better than a lot of flat blocks of foam.

Not sure why I can't change the text color?

Back to the Farm scene...

OK, with the KCS units behind me, it's time to get back to some scenery?  It's getting warm and the basement is a cool place to be during the hot summer.

Yesterday a friend and I ventured down to Spring Creek hobbies in Deshler, NE for something to do on Saturday.

Even though I really don't need anything at the moment I wandered into the scenery department and started looking around, you know getting the cogs turning again. Knowing I want to get back to the farm scene, I started looking at stuff for trees, shrubs and kudzu.

I wound up picking up some Woodland Scenics Foliage clumps, course turf and a bag of Poly Fiber, things that I knew I was getting low on.

Today I got the last of the green floral foam glued into place. Now to let it dry before I start carving.

A KCS detour over the Little Rock Line

 

KCS Ghosts!

For a long time I've always wanted some White KCS Deuces, meaning SD40-2's.

Back when I went railfanning a lot in the late 80's there were a couple sets of coal trains that usually had several KCS white deuces which we affectionately referred to as "Ghosts".  These trains were generally powered with a trio of SD40-2's

Here's a few examples of those trains.

Over the years I was lucky enough to pick up a couple of them.  An SD40-2 Snoot from eBay and an SD40 from a friend.  But I've always wanted a third one to go with the other two.  Well I finally decided to build the third one.

At some point I either seen an illustration or read about someone doing it.  KCS SD40-2's were numbered in the high 600's and one was numbered 666.  I pulled up CorelDraw and made quick drawing of a pentagram and added the wording "The Beast" so that I could add it to one side of the long hood.

In the process of gathering up everything I needed for the build, I remembered a guy on one of the forums who models KCS and how he always wished some manufacturer would release a white KCS SD40-2.

So I contacted him and asked if he'd like to have one?  Of course he said, so I decided to build two of them.  Mine would be a standard SD40-2 and his would be a snoot version, both of which KATO made in N scale.  

Unfortunately I did not get a lot of pictures as I was building them, because I was planning to use washes this time and I was thinking more about that than pictures.

Instead of using Pan Pastels this time around as I have on most of my recent Rock Island locos, I decided to give some commercial washes a try this time, primarily due to the fact that the locos were white.  I think the pan pastels would have or could have gotten them too dirty too quick?

These were made by MIG AMMO from their Rail Center line of washes, powders and paints.

There wasn't much for detail parts to add:  Three Firecracker antennas, a beacon, a horn and instead of a plow, they used what others have referred to as a "Rock Kicker" plow.  Here you can see what they look like.

I started out with TCP KCS Off White.

With the basic weathering done it was time to apply the washes.  I started out using one called "Aged", a very light gray, then I used another one called "Old Streaking Dust".  By the time that was applied it was getting kind of dark so I stopped.  But on the one for my friend, he said he wanted it rather dirty as he was modeling a later time period, so I added a lot of soot to his as well as some rust stains and burn marks.

This is how they turned out.

The 683

The Beast

I was pretty happy with how the washes worked out, now I have another weapon to add to my arsenal.