The Cascade Loop - a T gauge micro layout

[C855B]

What I want to know - does that Geep actually run? Regardless, it's all astounding.

[fshbwl]

welkom bij de railwire - dat is uitstekend werk

Merci beaucoup! Dank u wel! Vielen Dank!

And thank you very much to everyone else as well for your kind comments! I frankly did not expect this much feedback and am certainly very happy that you like my little layout. I'll still respond to some of your comments individually.

Oh, and happy Thanksgiving across the Pond!

Chris 

[fshbwl]

..., but that might just be THE best river water modeling I've seen in any scale!

Thank you, but now I'm slightly embarrassed. I've done a fair bit of reading about modelling techniques since taking up the hobby and have been closely looking at other people's layouts, but this is actually the first river I've done and only my second layout built (with the small Z scale layout visible in my initial post being the first one).

One of the reasons for doing the Cascade Loop was to experiment with different materials and techniques on a small surface, so that not too much would be lost if I had to bin it in case something went really wrong. Doing the river was actually the part I felt most apprehensive about, but in the end it turned out to be a lot easier to do than I had anticipated.

The first step (after doing a few experiments on a piece of card board) was to mix up different shades of greyish blue from acrylic colors and paint the river straight onto the baseboard - darker shades for deeper parts of the river, lighter shades for the shallows, and always avoiding any hard borders by painting wet-in-wet. Once the paint was dry, I applied up to 4 consecutive layers of acrylic water from Ammo by MIG with a straight 2mm brush. This acrylic water is available in different shades and I used the Lake waters, Pacific waters and Clear waters versions. In terms of technique, I basically used the brush to dip the acrylic water onto the prepainted river bed. That already gave a pretty good ripple effect which was further refined by carefully dipping the brush into the material again once it had already dried a bit. That was basically it.

Cheers,

Chris

[fshbwl]

How on Earth did you end up modeling the SP&S?  I grew up with it, in Pasco, Washington.  A lot of modelers in the eastern US have probably never heard of it.

I like it - and it looks like parts of the lower Columbia Gorge, SP&S country.

Thanks! A very nice question to which there are two answers - a sentimental one and a very practical one. Back in the mid-1980s and early 1990s I spent some time as an exchange student at highschool and university in Seattle and fell in love with the area. I also had a great-grandmother who grew up in Spokane. So when starting to work on this layout I thought it would be nice to make it "my" little slice of the Pacific Northwest.

What was still missing were the locos. I got a green GP8 from Tgauge.com which I slightly repainted to give it a vague Burlington Northern appearance. But I also wanted to have a F7 which I find to be a very beautiful engine (although I've never seen a real one). I found a T-scale shell on shapeways which fits onto the 16mm chassis sold by TGauge.com and then started searching the internet for a livery which would fit a Pacific Northwest setting and which would be easy to paint. That's how I ended up with the SP&S 

[fshbwl]

What I want to know - does that Geep actually run? Regardless, it's all astounding.

Yes, the GP8 does run. Below a short video. A bit fast in that video, but it can also go slower. To be honest, however, I've found the T gauge locos to be more fiddly to manage and to get running at really slow speeds, compared to Z scale (and that's not always easy either, at least with the standard controllers). Moreover, the 70mm radius on this layout is very tight, even by T gauge standards and essentially only for the short 16mm loco chassis. The regular T gauge radii starting at 120mm are easier in operational terms. (The F7 also runs, but I don't have a video yet of that).

[Chris333]

   So this layout is about the size of a standard sheet of paper!

[nkalanaga]

You chose a good scheme.  The SP&S is about the simplest of the BN schemes to do, if you have to make your own decals.  BN is easy to paint, and the NP freight Fs are even easier, solid black.  But the BN lettering would be more difficult to do, and the NP stripes would be very hard if one had to paint them.

It's nice to see another Northwest modeler, and I'm glad you enjoyed your time there.  I hope you got to visit Spokane, and see the "dry side" of Washington.  Very different to Seattle!