Grand Trunk Southern

[shark_jj]

That's a good suggestion Fredrick, I was actually giving it some thought and was going to try it out in the parking lot of the power plant to see how it looked.  I also like the photo that James posted.  Embedding the wood planks in the asphalt would give an interesting appearance.  I may try that somewhere. 

[Bob]

Thank you for taking the time to show your process in detail - this is incredibly helpful and informative.

[shark_jj]

One final item.  I mentioned it on the Sunday post but not here.  After finishing with the Pan Pastels, I gave the entire surface a light coat of DullCote to seal it.  This might not be an issue if you paint the lane markings but it is with PanPastels, you should seal them in so that any further work around the roadways doesn't smudge the PanPastels.  Also I did note that when a bit of water dropped on the parking lot area which hadn't been sealed yet, it did leave a small water mark.  This could become an issue moving forward as I do the scenery along the sides of the road so I definitely think sealing this with DullCote or a similar product is a good idea.

[shark_jj]

Here is a quick update on my ongoing saga with roads.  I had planned to do a lot of work on roads this week, however, on Monday the fellow who was scheduled to host our club group this week had to cancel and I quickly became the host, so a quick layout cleanup was in order and work halted for a few days.  What I did accomplish in the test area was to put down the scenic base around the road, paint it and cover it with basic ground cover, and start the process of building soft shoulders.  Cleaning up the shoulders, putting in static grass, adding shrub, highway barriers, K rails in the power plant parking lot, all in the next few weeks hopefully.  I also was able to put down the roadway in Nathansville.  Two lanes of road and two lanes of parking.  I also include some photos of that work in progress.  Here are photos and captions.

Photo 1:  Cork was used to build up the base for the soft shoulder and pink foam pieces were hot glued to the benchwork to give the terrain something other than a flat look. 



Photo 2: This shows the beginnings of the soft shoulder and the base hardshell and ground foam. 



Photo 3:  Opposite direction showing the area around the power plant.  Note on the right side of the photo, that as long as I was doing the area around the road I also did the gap between the two yards.

[shark_jj]

I also began the process of tackling the town of Nathansville.   The first step in the process was to create a template of the roads I was going to build.  As I moved forward this would prove to be a godsend.  As i reach steps where the template really helped out, I will highlight them.  The template was constructed from 8X11 sheets of heavy paper, taped together. 



I put the buildings on the template to see how they fit.



This photos shows the components of the road system.  Two 11 foot driving lanes, two 10 foot parking lanes, and a 7 foot sidewalk. 



I also realized by putting the buildings on the template that I needed to raise the buildings to the same level as the sidewalks.  Seems simple and obvious but until you start to put everything in place, it isn't that apparent.  This is where the template first became a godsend.  I cut out the actual roadways from the template.  What was left was the area that the buildings would sit in.  This now gave me a template, first to cut out hardboard bases and secondly to cut out the styrene from which the sidewalks will be cut as well as the base for the buildings.  This photo shows the hardboard bases, cut out and installed.

[shark_jj]

Next step was to put down the grout.  The following sequence of photos will show the road being put in.  The one thing I learned because this road was wider than the previous one.  Get a trowel wider than the road and clean it with a paper towel and re-wet it  after every pass. 





Road after drying and getting a light sanding. 



Parking lot for the IGA and the train station being put in.



Test fitting the buildings



Test fitting the station.

[shark_jj]

My next step was to do the striping on the roads.  I was able to get the centre stripes in before work ground to a halt this week.  This was the second place the template was a huge help.  I was able to use the template to cut masking tape to the correct radius for the road  curve to put in the striping.  Not sure how I would have done it otherwise. 

Since my Pan Pastel method had worked out so well on the test road, I did the same thing here.  I cut a thin piece of masking tape for the gap between the two lines.  Put it down first, right down the center line of the road.  I then put masking tape on leaving the width of the line marking open.  I then dabbed on the yellow Pan Pastel.  Once again it gave me nice clear lines.  That's as far as I got this week, so I will continue with the line markings in the coming days.  The four photos in this sequence show the process and the result.

[shark_jj]

The last month has been quite chaotic on the layout front for a variety of reasons and I have only had short snippets of time to work on anything, so I have tackled a host of little projects as time permitted.  First task, was to continue the conversion of the freight car fleet from MT Lo Pro wheelsets to Mid Pro wheelsets.  I like to think that my trackwork is well laid, however, in any operating session I seem to experience one or two derailments.  Almost always these occur during backup switching moves.  In each case the wheelsets were lo pros and the cars tended to be 50ft or longer.  Derailments during normal train movement on the mains are pretty well non existent.  Nonetheless, the concensus was that it was a combination of the Atlas Code 55 frogs and the LoPro wheelsets, thus the move to MidPros's.  Time will tell if this was a wise decision.  Most importantly, it was a job that could be done in the evenings while watching TV, a few cars at a time.   

Second minor task I am tackling has to do with my control panels.  If you have followed this thread, you will know that I had the control panel diagrams printed on a plasticized paper which was then attached to the panel with spray adhesive.  When there are only a couple of us in the layout room the panels sticking 2 or 3 inches into the 36 inch aisles hasn't been a problem.  However, our group has expanded a little over the last few years and having 7 guys over for an operating session isn't unusual.  A few of the guys aren't that svelte anymore and two people passing in the aisle can be a little tight but doable.  What has happened however is that the corners of the control panels are getting bumped.  Here's the result.



Solution, add guards to the sides of the panels.  I bought some L shaped styrene, painted it in as close a colour as I could get to the control panel and they are now ready to install.  That should solve that problem.  If anyone has a good suggestion on the type of glue to use with plastic paper on one side and wood on the other, I'd appreciate any insight.  I'm leaning towards canopy glue or a gel type CA. 

[shark_jj]

I also managed to tackle the P&G plant.  I have an Open House coming up in the first week of October and each year one of the first things people see are the mock ups of the P&G plant as seen in the photo below. 



Getting rid of those cardboard mockups and actually starting to build the plant was high on my list of "should get dones".  Quite by happenstance I have been assisting the widow of a fellow modeller sell off her husbands hobby stuff.  He had a good sized layout and a lot of building which were well done but it turns out that buildings are a hard sell.  There were a few small building in a factory complex that I thought I could make use of so I acquired them.  I would still have to scratchbuild the major buildings in the plant but it was a beginning.  Over the winter I started putting the major building together.  My youngest grandson helped out and added some rudimentary loading docks inside and after I created a template, he cut out the roof segments.  There is still a lot of work to do to detail these buildings and tone down the colours but at least they aren't cardstock mockups.  Here are some photos of the progress.

[shark_jj]

I also haven't lost sight of the town of Nathansville and I continue to work away at it slowly.  Here are some photos of the progress. 

First, I cut out the templates I had used for the design of the town.  This photo shows the road portion of the template having been cut out leaving the areas where the sidewalks and the buildings will be located.  These templates were placed on the scene and double checked to ensure that they were accurate and then they were used to cut out the styrene for the building base and sidewalks.



In this photo you can see the styrene bases cut out.  I scribed the sidewalk slabs, they don't show up well in the photo though they appear quite dark in real life.  You can also see that I have added the crosswalk at the corner of the street and put in the parking spots.  The parking lanes are 9 ft wide and 23 ft long while the travel lanes on the road are 11 foot wide.  I had hoped to go 10ft and 12 ft but had to do a little compression to make everything fit.



Closer view showing the sidewalk scribing.



Here we see the masking for the parking spots at the station



Parking spots installed



Again, we see the cross road and the line markings installed.  Needless to say that is not the location of the station.  Since the first two tracks are the mainline I have been slow at tackling the grade crossing so as not to take the layout out of operation until I have enough time to fully complete the job.

[shark_jj]

Last week I was cleaning up in the layout room to have the guys over on Wednesday night and I realized that road leading to Gavinsport was the last bit of major construction I needed to do before I could totally clean the room and then just work on detail stuff leading up to the Open House in a few months.  Why not tackle it and get it out of the way since it would involve some demo and rebuild using plaster, both of which are messy, so get it done and get it cleaned up.  As I mentioned in the weekend thread, I tore out the existing scenery, put in a subroadbed to hold the roadway and reinstalled the hardshell scenery.  As you will notice I masking tape the whole area to be plastered before putting on the plaster.  Since I started doing that 20 or so years ago I never worry about plaster dripping on the floor anymore.  Here are some photos of that job.  As stated a few posts back, June was kind of a disjointed month, not major progress, but we did move forward on a number of projects.

[shark_jj]

Work has continued on numerous fronts, so I will do a serious of catchup posts to show the ongoing progress.  As previously noted, I had been experiencing damage to the plastic paper on the control panels.  I had made the decision to put L shaped styrene guards on them.  Matching the colour was a challenge since the face of the panels is a computer generated colour.  I think I got it close enough that it is not overly noticeable.  I had also waffled on how to attach them, finally deciding to go with double sided tape.  I was afraid of glue leaking onto the face of the panels. Worked out ok, though cutting the thin strips of tape fits into the PIA category.  Couple of photos of 2 of the 6 finished panels. 

[shark_jj]

I also continued work in Nathansville.  I appreciate that it looks like I am jumping all over the place right now, however, there is a method to my madness.  I am trying to get all of the "dirty work" done.  Plastering, grout roads, basic scenery glued down, etc, before I move on to some of the finer detail work.  With the "dirty work" done I can clean up a lot of the supplies that are currently cluttering the layout room and the layout itself. 

In Nathansville, I have done some plastering, and in the area between the tracks put down paint and a basic covering of ground foam that I use as the base for the rest of the scenery.  Here's a couple of photos of that work in progress.  Like many others, I never throw out scraps of pink foam, instead using them to create some ground contours on otherwise flat areas. 





I have also cut out the styrene bases for the buildings in Nathansville.  If you recall in previous photos the styrene was one large sheet with the sidewalks etched on.  By cutting out the buildings I can create both ground contours in the rear yards, and add walkways between the buildings.  Some will be brick, some will be gravel, dirt, grass mixtures.  You will also see that I have pre-drilled holes in the building bases so that if I add lighting in the future, it will be ready to be wired.  Once I glue the styrene down, I will drill through the benchwork.  First photo shows the styrene base and the second photo the buildings in place.

[shark_jj]

Speaking of plaster and basic ground cover.  I haven't forgotten the power plant area.  As long as I was plastering, I put more down around the original roadway that I put in. 

[lock4244]

What a great building. I'm going to do the parts of an automobile assembly plant that matter most... the part the parts boxes disappear into. This is very much what I've envisioned in my head and is very inspiring.