The New Northern Central

[Ed Kapuscinski]

You're going to need a lot of trees...

Yep. The good news is that I can recycle them though.

[C855B]

Yep. The good news is that I can recycle them though.

And not through a chipper, like 1:1?   

[Ed Kapuscinski]

And not through a chipper, like 1:1?   

Lol, no, I don't have the ... 15 years? for them to grow back up, lol.

[Ed Kapuscinski]

I went through two knife blades with the carving, but here we go.

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This is the "why the NCR doesn't exist anymore" view coming together.

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After all the work I did some JFRTM to enjoy my handiwork. Here's a train tied up in staging. This is a Photoshop focus stack.

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That I then played with a bit in Photoshop.

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[Ed Kapuscinski]

Spent all weekend carving foam and never broke a sweat.

Just installed four switch "machines"? Sweating like a dog.

I don't know why that seems to be the sweatiest task, but it seems to be the way.

[Chris333]

With all of your photoshopery making an American version of this guys N scale layout should be easy. Everything looks like cardboard printouts, but look how detailed it is with just enough 3D detail.
https://www.youtube.com/c/Chandwell/videos

[Ed Kapuscinski]

With all of your photoshopery making an American version of this guys N scale layout should be easy. Everything looks like cardboard printouts, but look how detailed it is with just enough 3D detail.
https://www.youtube.com/c/Chandwell/videos

I just subscribed to him. I'm paying a lot of attention. It looks like seriously good stuff.

[Ed Kapuscinski]

Made some progress carving some foam on the suburbia side of the layout this weekend.



I'm thinking tree line along the top of the ridge, then a grassy area, then a housing development down front.

I also realized, as I'm carving, that I'm absolutely recreating my old "Kidney" layout here.
https://conrail1285.com/category/layouts/kidney-on-a-door/

And I'm not sad about it. That was a good layout, and the more I learn about the NCR, the more I realized how I actually captured its look on it. Much more so than I thought I had at the time.

[DKS]

That "temporary" loop is looking increasingly less temporary.

[Ed Kapuscinski]

That "temporary" loop is looking increasingly less temporary.

I know, I know...
But I want to play with some rural scenery, so I'm putting more effort into it than I otherwise probably should.

[dem34]

Well rural is fun to let off steam. Barely any complicated models to deal with and a lot of progress can be made in an evening with just a couple shakers of scenic material.

[Ed Kapuscinski]

Well rural is fun to let off steam. Barely any complicated models to deal with and a lot of progress can be made in an evening with just a couple shakers of scenic material.

Exactly. And urban stuff is complicated. This is so relatively easy. The only big issue is getting all the slopes to look natural, and to an extent, even that doesn't matter when you're hiding much of it with trees.

[sirenwerks]

With all of your photoshopery making an American version of this guys N scale layout should be easy. Everything looks like cardboard printouts, but look how detailed it is with just enough 3D detail.
https://www.youtube.com/c/Chandwell/videos

This guys stuff is very nice.  I always resisted appear as a structural medium but he makes me reconsider.  I wish I still modeled a place where brick was the dominant building material. 

[Ed Kapuscinski]

I think it's been a week or two at least since I last ran anything. I wanted to pull out all my Scaletrains cars to add resistors, and I decided to do it with an NW2. I was PLEASANTLY surprised by how well it worked even without recent cleaning.

I was having too much fun to get a photo, but here's the result. I call this photo "Do you think I have a problem?".

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[Ed Kapuscinski]

The section where the layout starts seems like it's a good place to start some scenery, right?

To that end I started working on it. One of the first things to do was to figure out the bridge over Mill Creek.

Here's the proto.

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And the work in progress.
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As you can see, some compression is required, but I think this captures the look pretty decently.