Turf & Trees

This weekend marked a great milestone in building out the Silver Mountain. I got new brown, tan, and grey paint from Home Depot, and was able to more or less finish the landscaping on the mountain. I re-painted the ground brown and filled in the white spots between rock faces with a few shades of gray. Then I proceeded to sprinkle a coating of various shades of turf and fixed that in place with Scenic Cement using a spray bottle. The result was a much more natural-looking effect than before.

I drilled holes for the trees using a manual Fiskars crafts drill and my older son was all too happy to plug in the trees into the holes. I used a dab of Gorilla glue to make sure they stayed in place. I used small Busch trees on the top of the mountain and larger Woodland Scenics pines closer to tracks to create a sense of perspective. It worked great, and I loved the quality on both. I had a third bag of cheaper trees that just looked so awful I ended up putting in just a few of them, mixed with the beautiful Busch trees. I added more lichen around the rock faces to simulate undergrowth and bushes.

Finally, I started working on the ground. I used tan paint, not the yellowish one I originally got, and sprinkled three shares of turf on top. I got a lot on the tracks, but a layer of ballast should cover those so I did not worry a lot about it at this stage.

Rocks Done

All the mountain rock faces are now in place and painted. Looking pretty good.

I also gave the smooth areas an Arizona Tan coat but that looks way too yellow. Saturday I will stop by Home Depot to get a browner paint. But until then, happy railroading.

Building the Mountain

The past week I have been hard at work building the Silver Mountain itself. My rock factory has been humming at peak capacity, producing rock castings from Lightweight Hydrocal. I have ran through three half-gallon containers of the stuff before running out Sunday night, and have attached all of the castings to the mountainside using Sculptamold. Here are some pictures of the current state of the mountain.

After attaching and coloring the first batch of rock faces, I started to apply a layer of tan paint and gluing grass on the mountaintop. To my annoyance, I realized that I had really no way of sprinkling grass on the near-vertical surfaces between the rock castings. I did place some lichen bushes in those areas, but decided to add some more rock castings to the side of the mountain to cover the majority of the near-vertical areas. Modeling Colorado, I thought it would not be realistic to have too much lush undergrowth on the side of the mountain, and that rock faces would be much more prototypical. So I got my factory back up and running, and as a result you are seeing uncolored rocks mixed with painted ones in the picture.

Regarding painting the rocks, I decided to follow the "leopard" painting method promoted by Woodland Scenics for their Earth Colors pigments. It was dead easy and I was shocked at how good the colors turned out to be with so little effort, and on a first try. I just diluted three of their colors, umber, slate gray, and black, with water, splashed some spots on the rock with the two first colors and applied a thin wash of 16x diluted black and that was it. I ran out of the colors and ordered some more, and should be in a position to finish the rocks tonight.

Regarding the base pain and the grass, I kind of wished I had picked a darker tan tone for the base layer. My original choice, Arizona Tan by Behr, was picked with the New Mexico landscape in mind, and looks less well-placed in Colorado. So I just may pick up gray and darker brown base colors next time I'm at Home Depot. I also tried using a spray bottle for applying Scenic Cement over the sprinkled turf mix, but may go with an eyedropper bottle in the next round.

One major lesson was that I wished the mountain wasn't quite as big, and that I had built less steep sides to it. Now I won't have many places besides the top to put trees on, and I have to put in more vertical stone faces than I had planned. I'll keep that in mind for the next time - and as a matter of fact, already applied that lesson to my smaller mountainside in the other corner of the layout.

Casting Rocks

I have now covered Silver Mountain with a thin layer of Sculptamold. It took about 2/3 of a 3 lbs bag to get even coverage, but the results look pretty good. I have now moved on to adding rock castings around the base of the mountain, and will add some here and there to the mountainside as well.

I have three rock molds, two with larger rock faces, and one with smaller outcroppings. I have so far mixed five or six batches of Lightweight Hydrocal for the casts and attached the first crop of rocks to the base of the mountain. There are a few lessons:

• The process is very slow. I can get maximum of two molding batches done per night, given I work 45 minutes to an hour per night on the layout. I have ordered two more molds from Amazon and they should arrive today.
• Putting random rock castings next to each other looks more like a pile of rubble. Placing similar, and large, castings next to each other creates the illusion of actual rock formations. I have therefore started to prefer the large molds for larger surfaces, and the two new molds are both large, flat molds for this purpose. I have also started to save multiple identical castings for placing next to each other, as opposed to attaching them to the mountainside in the order they are ready.
• Using Sculptamold as "mortar" for attaching the castings works great for both plaster cloth and foam sheet surfaces, and allows me to smooth out the edges of the casting with the leftover Sculptamold too.

Here is a picture of my rock factory. I will post pics of the actual mountainside when I have more of the rock faces attached.

Running The Mainline

This video shows you Silver Mountain Railroad mainline in its current glory (and a quick glimpse of the youngest of our three engineers)

 

New Rolling Stock

Six new boxcars arrived on my doorsteps yesterday. All are Micro-Trains Santa Fes with unique running numbers. These should be all the boxcars I need for now, but I'm planning on getting some hoppers for the mine, and perhaps a tank car or two just for fun (there are rumors of oil being found near the mountain).

I decided to go with MTL rolking stock whenever possible since I am less than confident in my ability to change couplers, and MTL couplers seem to be the way to go. My first N scale cars had incompatible couplers and I have to figure out how to change them, a task I am not looking forward to.

Mountain

With the tunnel firmly in place, I built the Silver Mountain on top of it last night. Instead of foam sheets, I chose to use plaster cloths because of the large size of the mountain I wanted. I shaped the mountain using crumpled magazine pages, held loosely together with masking tape. After an issue of Wired, D Magazine and a holiday double issue of The Economist, the mountain was as big as I wanted (or actually it turned out a bit bigger!). Unfortunately, I did not have my phone on me at this stage, so I don't have a picture of the crumpled paper mountain for you  - but it did look quite spectacular! Then I simply cut out palm-sized pieces of Woodland Scenics plaster cloth, dipped them in warm water, and laid the over the outline. I had bought two rolls, which was enough for about one and half layers. I wished I had some more, but the shell turned out quite sturdy and a further layer of Sculptamold may add to rigidity to the areas with just one layer. The whole process took 1 hour and 15 minutes from start through cleanup and there was no mess whatsoever. And wow, the mountain turned out bigger than I thought, but then again it is going to be the centerpiece of the whole layout.