Tehachapi, BC

[GaryHinshaw]

Good comments.  I like the idea of a 3-d substation there, and I think there is enough room in the corner, but I also like the effect of a coved backdrop, to help soften the corner. 

Another possibility: just up the road from Edison is a company that makes plastic pipe for agricultural use, and which receives quite a few pellet hoppers by rail. 



It would be nice to add one more spur back there with the plant building being a shallow relief structure against a coved backdrop, but with the silos and trackside detail being 3-d:



Streetview photos could represent the pipe yard next to it:

[packers#1]

Gary, the backdrops are looking good. Also, I cannot emphasize enough how good of an idea that would be. Similar to the corn syrup tankers, plastic pellet industries require spotting specific hoppers in specific places to line up the unloading hoses for the different plastics. I’m not totally familiar with plastic pipe production, but I know at the power cable plant I worked at, we got about 4 different kinds of plastic in by rail. However, I’d wager they use a couple different kinds depending on what the pipe is designed to do and the price point; that’s why I’m modeling a plastic film factory on my layout, there can be up to 7 different kinds of plastic per type!

[John]

It would be nice to add one more spur back there with the plant building being a shallow relief structure against a coved backdrop, but with the silos and trackside detail being 3-d:

Gives you another place to switch cars -- I had quite a few industries on my old layout that were low relief against the backdrop .. all you need is a spot to drop the car ..

[Scottl]

The pipe yard would look very good there.  I'm not sure though that it is a good location in the room to stand while switching. 

[GaryHinshaw]

Ok, here is a quick & dirty proof of concept.  It turns out there is a bit more room in that corner than I was imagining, even after allowing for coving the backdrop.  So I plopped down a piece of flex track, spotted a few plastics hoppers, and grabbed an old structure I had lying around to get a rough idea of the look (still with the previous backdrop):



Seems plausible enough.  To Scott's point about access, there is a hole in the Loop shelf, so it's possible to stand up in there:



It does require a duck-under to access, but a rolling stool makes that less onerous:



And the lower deck is a bit below eye level when seated:



so switching while seated is feasible.   All in all, this seems promising.

-gfh

P.S. Believe it or not, I started scratch-building that structure back around 1977.  Maybe I'll actually finish it one day. 

P.S.² I'm liking the look of the sky (aside from the artifacts) in these lower deck backdrops.

[Scottl]

It does look promising, but I'm not sure the operational value of a switching job there.  There will be lots to do nearby in Edison when that is completed with better operator access. 

You could consider putting the yard, track and buildings there as a purely scenic exercise, and not use to for operations.  I'm a big fan of cosmetic track that is non-operational.

[chuck geiger]

[GaryHinshaw]

^ Cool.  Do you know who the owner is?

I've been spending the weekend upping my Streetview and Gimp skills.  The latest is another scene near Edison, in the vicinity of the pipe plant mentioned a few posts ago.   In this area, the best Streetview imaging I could get was from May 2019 and it happened to be an uncharacteristically cloudy day:



Since the clouds are much further away than the foreground, they repeat in the stitched images and look dorky.  So I spent some time blending the seams in the foreground, then replaced the sky with a Streetview snippet taken nearby, but on a clear day:



[Click on the image for a larger version.]  Still a bit of tuning to do with the composition, but the whole Streeview >> backdrop paradigm is looking promising.

[GaryHinshaw]

Here is a quick test print with the above clear blue sky backdrop:



Too blue, compared to Kern Jct on the left.  I think I'll shoot for something in between the two: a bit less saturated on the right, a bit more on the left. 

I like the content in the new version better than the substation version:



The pipe plant will be a better fit to this corner, whether or not we end up actually switching it, and the general vibe is pretty clearly Central Valley.  (The spur won't be so high in the final version, and the backdrop probably needs a bit of repositioning still too.)

[C855B]

Hey, Gary - What printer do you have? I need to buy stock in the company that supplies your ink. You have got to be changing cyan cartridges on a daily basis. 

[John]

Gary - maybe paint the backdrop and then only add the lower few inches with the structures and trees ... might give you move flexibility, and given the location should be easy to pull off

[GaryHinshaw]

Hey, Gary - What printer do you have? I need to buy stock in the company that supplies your ink. You have got to be changing cyan cartridges on a daily basis. 

LOL.  Just a vanilla Epson Inkjet.  Amazingly, I haven't had to change cartridges since starting this latest run of test prints.  So don't invest too heavily. Better to put your money in auto racks. 

To John's comment: I'm actually pretty optimistic about the sky with these tests.  In this latest backdrop test, I  figured out how to pick out the sky and replace it with another sky, so it will be pretty straightforward to tune the right level of saturation and match sky tones across the different scenes.  And it's much easier to let software cut out and replace the sky, than for me to do it with scissors.  The saturation gradient is also much more convincing, at least to my eyes.  I can't wait to see what one of these scenes looks like with a real printer...

[GaryHinshaw]

Another minor backdrop update.  I spent a bit of time improving the Kern Jct backdrop by blending the stitched Streetview images and by replacing the stitched sky with a homogeneous sky taken from another image, stretched to fit.  The shot below shows a portion of the full scene with the raw images (lower) and the blended images (upper) for comparison:



I also replaced the sky in the trial backdrop on the other side of the Vortex, so it matches the Kern sky.  Here's a shot showing both new prints temped in place:



This un-cropped shot shows the view a typical operator will see when running through Kern Jtc:



And here are a fewer closer shots from left to right, heading out of town:







[I need to extend that last scene another 8-10" to the right and and also cover the little blank strip on the left.) 

On the right side, the pipe plant has been moved over so there is more open, distant Central Valley vibe as you leave Bakersfield.



Next steps:
* Tweak the sizing a bit to make sure the backdrop covers all of the sky board.  These cheap prints are super helpful for checking composition and sizing, but printer striping and taped paper joints are getting tiresome.

* Make a few minor improvements to the image blending.

* Get a test print from a local vendor.  At work we had some vinyl posters made up that adhere to wall board very nicely and have excellent print quality.  I will soon be in touch with them to see what they can do for me.  I'm especially curious to see how the sky renders, since my printer is adding a lot of purple compared to digital image at the beginning of this post.

Thanks for looking,
-gfh

P.S. I finally did have to replace the cyan cartridge. 

[C855B]

P.S. I finally did have to replace the cyan cartridge. 

Told ja. <snicker>

[Ed Kapuscinski]

And that's why I just got my own printer...