Tehachapi, BC

[GaryHinshaw]

Just a brief tale of woe: I'm in LA for two days of meetings, but sadly don't have enough spare time to hit Tehachapi on this trip.  So near yet so far.  Sigh.

Before I left, I managed to get some of the sub-roadbed permanently installed on the top deck and started laying cork around the walls. Hopefully some actual track-laying can commence next weekend.

-gfh

[3DTrains]

Gary - next time you're down, and provided you have the time, let's hook up for a trip through the pass. I'm 60-miles east of LA in Riverside. Perhaps then I'll have something to show for my layout plans.

[GaryHinshaw]

Marc, thanks very much for the offer!  I will try to take you up on it next time.  I should add that anyone who is or will be in the Vancouver area should feel free to contact me if you'd like to stop by and see my progress (still just a glorified Brio setup for now, alas).

It was a busy work week so not too much progress, but I did manage to get the roadbed along the Monolith and Mojave shelves permanently installed:



I also glued the ballast down and tried a quick weathering test on my practice track:



It's not quite there yet, but it's getting closer.  I'd especially like to find a way to darken the 'rail clips' without too much pain.  Sorry about the sketchy photo quality...

-gfh

[JSL]

The benchwork looks solid. I like the look of the ballast.

JSL

[Philip H]

Gary,
could you darken the clips with an ultra fine point Sharpie?  granted they only seem to come in Black, Blue or Red, but perhaps the black, with a few washes and other weathering treatments would work.

[GaryHinshaw]

Thanks JSL.

Philip, I had a brown Sharpie that I tried that with a while back.  The results looked great -- until I wet the ballast with alcohol prior to gluing.  If you ever need to erase a Sharpie, I recommend alcohol.    

I suppose I could use soapy water as a wetting agent instead, but getting neat results with the Sharpie was fairly time consuming, so now I guess I'm looking for something quick & dirty (but not too dirty).  Thanks for the suggestion though.

Cheers,
Gary

[Scottl]

I would imagine a clever design with a pair of Sharpies and a freight truck or two, and you could glide down the track, hitting the top of those tie plates uniformly.

Looks great, especially the visiting motive power!  You say it's Tehachapi, but I'm still secretly hoping it will turn into Spiral Tunnels!

[Philip H]

I went Sharpie because it was easy . . . maybe there's an art supply house in Vancouver that would have something more robust.

[ednadolski]

I'd especially like to find a way to darken the 'rail clips' without too much pain. 

I did some experimenting a little while back with a burnt umber paint marker (can't recall exactly which one) and was pleased with the results. It takes a little practice to get uniform results.  However I didn't test it against alcohol.  I'm not sure which plastic ME uses for the ties, but it seems like one of those kinds that doesn't take paint very well -- a bit of a double-whammy unfortunately.  Woodland Scenics now makes a new kind of paint marker in a couple of different colors that might be worth a try.

Have you thought about how to do the grayish dust coating that accumulates on the rails, like under the loco in this pic?   I had done some tests with crushed/powdered pastel sticks, applied with a soft brush, that seemed promising.

Side note - I wish ME offered their concrete tie flextrack with code 40 rail.  Not so much the rail height, but the railhead width on their C55 scales out to about five scale inches, which is nearly double the prototype railhead width.  It tends to be more noticeable because that's the part that stays shiny.  It's just a reminder that there is no N-scale rail, all the C55 rail is made to represent 75 lb. rail on HO scale.


Ed

[GaryHinshaw]

Thanks for the feedback gents -- a few comments are sprinkled in with the new photos below.   I continued my little etude on ballasting & weathering this evening and took some before and after shots; in this case before and after gluing the ballast and weathering it.  The first pair of shots look along the track from both directions:




Low shots along the track like this are almost always very unforgiving of model track, and these are no exception.  The wide railhead that Ed notes is quite evident here.  The second pair are side views:




A few comments:

* In general, I like the ballast profile in the new section better than the old.  The latter had the ballast between the rails too sharply concentrated in a ridge near the center and had too many gaps under the rails where you could see the plastic tie connections.    Concrete tie track usually has some ballast above the tie tops between the rails, but a more uniform spread is probably more convincing, e.g., this shot.

* The viewing angle makes a huge difference.  In the first pair of shots, the weathering looks rather splotchy, whereas I like the last shot rather a lot (except for the aforementioned ballast profile).  The splotchiness comes in part to me trying slightly different colors, etc. on that section, so that is partly correctable, and it's de-emphasized in the side views.

* Some of the splotchiness comes from the ties not taking the weathering uniformly.  The technique here was simply dusting on some Bragdon powders.  I suspect that one reason for this is that I didn't apply the matte medium very uniformly when gluing the ballast (I used a dropper).  I think I might try brushing a flat finish on the ties before ballasting, or maybe just spraying the whole schmear with Dullcote first, to see if that helps.

* Thanks for the comments on coloring the clips.  The idea of a truck gizmo is intriguing.    I'll be on the lookout for other types of markers too.  I'm also going to try a medium to heavy grime wash right along the rails to see if just toning them down looks ok.  This may help to de-emphasize the rail width too, but I'm not sure. 

Thanks for looking.  If I could sum up the look I'm going for, it would be captured by the warning sign that is often posted near a busy mainline : "Warning: a train could come at any time from either direction."  I want the viewer to have this sense when looking at the track.  The last shot is starting to give me that sense...

-Gary

[GaryHinshaw]

Here are a few proto track photos, mostly for my own future reference.  Skip them,unless you're obsessed, like I am.   There is a fairly wide range of weathering in this collection.  One of them is the same one Ed posted.   

http://www.railpictures.net/viewphoto.php?id=324182&nseq=99
http://www.railpictures.net/viewphoto.php?id=368722&nseq=233
http://www.railpictures.net/viewphoto.php?id=277672&nseq=170
http://www.railpictures.net/viewphoto.php?id=378270&nseq=138
http://www.railpictures.net/viewphoto.php?id=372035&nseq=202
http://www.railpictures.net/viewphoto.php?id=310063&nseq=133
http://www.railpictures.net/viewphoto.php?id=391250&nseq=2
http://www.railpictures.net/images/d1/7/4/8/5748.1313542933.jpg

[C855B]

Gary, that first picture is a rare view of how green (!!!) Tehachapi can be in a wet spring. It's not always that arid look everyone models. This spring promises to be the same... we flew out of California yesterday just ahead of a week-long soaking.

Sort of related, we attended a big railfan event the past weekend out there. Multiple people were commenting that the current roadmaster assigned to the Tehachapi segment is hyper-aggressive about chasing people "off the property", and is even hassling over photography from public roads. Sadly, we go through that from time to time.

[Scottl]

Gary, those photos suggest the ballast cover is quite a bit wider than most people model it, about three times the gauge width.   This is particularly evident in the first photo with a single track.   Your track work and ballast profile looks very good to my eye, but I do think you are a bit "narrow" compared to the prototype.  Am I just imagining that?

[John]

Multiple people were commenting that the current roadmaster assigned to the Tehachapi segment is hyper-aggressive about chasing people "off the property", and is even hassling over photography from public roads. Sadly, we go through that from time to time.

I will just pull out my BNSF railfan club card .. that will calm him down

[GaryHinshaw]

C855B, yes indeed Tehachapi does have a wonderful 'Irish Spring'.  In fact, the last time I was on the hill was about a week after that first shot was taken and green it was!  One might ask why anyone in their right mind would model Tehachapi in a season other than spring.  For me the intense heat and drought of late summer adds a sense of struggle to the arduous job of getting trains over the hill.  If I were modeling Donner, it would be mid-winter with 12-foot snow drifts, to impart the same sense of challenge.   RE the Roadmaster, I hadn't heard that.  Ironically, Don Philips had a column in this month's Trains about UP trying to make friends with photographers (if I remember correctly).  Maybe it hasn't trickled down yet...

Scott, good point about the profile - it is indeed surprisingly wide.  I'll have to see how it looks in the context of the whole scene.  My inclination is to go with what I'm practicing now so the right-of-way doesn't overpower the scene (a form of selective compression).  I'm also a bit worried that it would look 'sloppy', like I was just spraying ballast everywhere.  But I'll see what looks right when the real ballast goes down.

I tried a quick rail clip test before work this morning with supplies on hand and I'm somewhat encouraged.  I dug out some water soluble oil paint in a tube (raw umber) and thinned it ~50/50 with 99% alcohol, then just painted along the rail base, applying 2-3 coats of it.   Here's a side view, showing that it doesn't cover completely, but it does give the illusion that the clips could actually be pieces of hardware rather than blobs of plastic:



(a repeat of the before shot for comparison):



What's shocking is how much darker it looks from the other angle:



but the proto clips tend to stand out in similar views, so maybe it's not so bad.  I'd like to get a bit more soot down between the rails to see if that de-emphasizes the width of the rail, before making any final decisions.  (I also applied a light wash of black to the ballast shoulder in the foreground - it's a real patchwork display.)

Comments welcome.  I'm going to try these again on the longer stretch of newly ballasted track tonight.

-gfh