Just Between You, Me, and the Bingo Card: Life Lessons from the Assisted Living Facility

I may or may not be forming ideas and attempting to get my N gauge stuff from my parents.

 

You must add a nude beach. Old men like nude beaches.

 

at this scale, there ain't too much to see.

 

What the hell? Ain't no engineer got time for a nude beach.

 

Where do you think the term "train wreck" comes from

 

Reading most of your posts.
Ironically, the only thing I can find wrong with this one is a missing question mark.

 

?

 

I have been procrastinating on the tunnel construction, for no particular reason...
well, tunnel construction has to be done with one very important catastrophe in mind...derailment.
Large scale trains, like "O" scale and bigger are not a problem when this occurs, just simply reach in and retrieve the cars.
Smaller scales, this is virtually impossible. You need a solid tunnel to push/pull the derailed cars through, or have a "cutout" section of tunnel to remove if needed. Since my rail runs above the tunnel, it cannot be removed. A cutout underneath the layout is another method. This one is short enough, a simple complete tunnel will be fine.
I made a cardboard form for the plaster cloth to line, then coated it with Sculptamold for strength and texture.


Beer and oatmeal boxes work well for this.


When it's dry, I'll give it a coat of paint and set it in place permanently.

 

before I can place the tunnel, I have to ballast the track, at least as far as I can reach, to make it look kind of complete.
This is why I was procrastinating. Ballasting track is actually kind of fun and relaxing, you can get a lot done if you are prepped in advance. But it's one of those things that there is a lot involved, so to just do a small section is kind of time consuming. Ballast is normally the last thing you do on a layout. Mother Nature was first, the railroad intruded later.

Rail roads are notoriously cheap...so keeping with that theme, you'll notice the low budget materials
Bird gravel for ballast.
The large white bottle is a 50/50 mix of white glue and water
Then a bottle of straight white glue, cheap shit, bought a case of it several years ago.
The little brown spray bottle is what you call "wet water', it's water with just a drop of dish soap. This bottle is way too small for mixing that, it's 16oz to two drops if soap normally. I'll explain why later.
Then a spoon, and a few brushes.


Start with a bead of white glue down the edge. Spread it with a small brush just on the sides of the "bank"

I'm being real sloppy with this, it's a tunnel, so no need for neatness.

Using a small brush, I spread the ballast from the center out to the edge.
exposing the ties.

Next, spray it with the "wet water" solution. The reason for this is that the soap/water breaks up the surface tension and helps to settle the ballast. otherwise the 50/50 glue solution will simply bead up and sit on top.

Then use a pipette to coat it with the 50/50 glue and water mix.



And the other side. You can see the small section that I can't reach, once the tunnel is in place and the portals, you really won't be able to tell.

 

One thing I noticed right off is the track bed is way too wide for scale appearance..
I'll have to trim it back. I can't even begin to deal with it looking that far out of scale.
Also, I think the bird gravel may be too large as well., but like I said, tunnel. I guarantee the engineers that built it simply ballasted the track with the leftover blasted rock. As long as things cleared, it was good to go.

Here is a sample track, for display purposes, I made several years ago.
This gives an idea of what we are shooting for.

 

Just about finished with the tunnel prep. This has actually been holding me up for the next phase.

 

Rock formation. I suck at this part, should be easy to make a freaking rock face, but no.


It'll look different once it's stained. Maybe even passable from a distance.

 

Man, going much quicker than I was expecting.

 

It's awesome. I will only need one bag of popcorn to watch this thing get completed!

 

GD Martha Stewart of toy trains over here.

What happened to this thread?

 

At least I can keep track of the progress in here. Unlike various other CO threads these days.

 

These are not "toy" trains, these are scale model trains. Kids play with toys.

 

Im still subscribed to this thread and its not a big explosion..... thats weird.

 

Just wait to the hyper squirrel sees you posted here, bam 50 pages in 50 secs.