Newport & Rock Falls: Another Retro Micro-Layout

[DKS]

Thank you, Gary.

17 March 2021. It was "get the bloody ballast done already" day today, so I set that as my goal. And I had enough time left after that to wrap up virtually all of the scenery. All I have left to do now is make three short roads, and install seven streetlights.



That is all for today.

[Chris333]

Just think how many of those kits they would have sold back then with photos like these in the ads.

[Lemosteam]

Beautiful.  Nuff said.

[CRL]

You still need to finish those 3 houses in the foreground. 😉

[wm3798]

Okay.  So now run some damn trains.  Oh wait... I might have them all now.  What do you want back?

Lee

[wm3798]

Remarkably similar to the work of another Master of the Micro, our dear departed 3rdRail...


Job well done, sir.
Lee

[DKS]

18 March 2021. With all of the major work done already, today I concentrated on tying up some loose ends. First, I lit and installed the second of two background buildings (still need to add flat trees):



Next, I replaced the NJI brass signals with cheapie Chinese jobs:





Why on Earth did I do this? The NJI signals looked "too good" for the layout. The Chinese numbers are clunky-looking, with enormous signal heads—which is fine, since it's easy to imagine them containing grain of wheat bulbs. Finally, I installed seven streetlights:



By contrast, these cheapie Chinese numbers actually looked better than expected, but I'm not going to keep re-buying streetlights looking for the "worst" ones. There's not much left to do...

[DKS]

19 March 2021. Continuing to mop up loose ends, and with the messiest of construction behind me, I added the "water" to the world's smallest harbor (just a coat of extra-thick clear gloss gel, stippled in arcs for waves).



I finally started working the roads, beginning with the Newport station parking lot. I used 0.030" white sheet styrene, instead of the usual (for me) black, so I could use a different technique to make stripes: after painting the piece dark grey, I scraped the lines into the paint with a tiny screwdriver. To make the lines appear weathered, I scraped lightly, and I made yellow lines by tracing over the scrapes with a yellow Sharpie. The road running off to the right has a crown, courtesy of a piece of strip styrene underneath along the center that's about 0.020" thicker than the ones along the edges.



By the way, I'm well aware the lot is ridiculously small, with parking for only five sub-compact cars, and nowhere to turn a car around. I'm making do with the available space, and hopefully viewers will be too distracted by everything that's going on to notice the flaws. Anyway, there's the footbridge available to bring passengers over from the off-stage parking, so this could be the station personnel lot.

   

The road behind the factory dips down and is tapered to force perspective. Above left is the normal view; above right is a helicopter shot to show the trick.



Lastly, I installed a fence to keep passengers out of the rail yard.

[OldEastRR]

Excellent work. With completion, are you now going to move onto "The Very VERY last version of the White River and Northern"?

You should sell these mini-layouts.

[DKS]

Excellent work. With completion, are you now going to move onto "The Very VERY last version of the White River and Northern"?

You should sell these mini-layouts.

Thanks. Not sure what I'll move on to, if anything. As for selling, I could never expect to receive what they're worth, even just in materials, much less time.

[DKS]

[peteski]

Lights!! Whoa!  That's wick'd cool!  I LIKE IT!

[CRL]

Very very nice. Thanks for letting us in on your build.

That harbor needs a very small barge to offload, or maybe just a small push boat “waiting” for the off layout barge.

[mu26aeh]

The line painting idea is genius !

[glakedylan]

excellence
what can one say in response that is apropos?
exceeding excellence


thanks for sharing
Gary