While waiting for materials some flex track did arrive, so i took the opportunity to layout Ackerville before making any more progress.

Tonight i decided to add 9 supports for the backscene behind what will be the ackerville module. I even had my little helper Annabel watching me. Now I know you don’t want to be bored with a repeated post about fitting these things so here is your favourite thing a little timelapse.

So in my pack of snow products was one called snow wash. This seemed pretty cool and a good place to start with snowy scenes i mean it snows on cars right. Ok down to it this is the wee bottle we are talking about. Now you can skip my chatter and go straight to the experts using it here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lk-BERp1RvA

So how did i use this stuff, well to be honest i gave it a good shake and then applied it to any surface that is flat where snow would fall on the car. So roof, end ribs, door guides and rain strip.

When first applied the wash looks like a white paint wash but the snow particles in the wash start to flow to the edges and into the recesses of the model as it dries. This was the first coat but I applied a second and then used a dry brush to move the settling material to the edges of the roof.

I then detailed the ends and even managed to get the effect of melted and re-frozen snow on an end rib.

So as you can see its a nice build up of frozen snow in the recesses fo the car to give that frozen effect. Fresh snow would blow off the car when moved but the frozen ice below the top snow layer is left in extreme temperatures and this is what I was going for.

Here you can see the snow collecting on the end grab irons/ladders and build up in the door runner.

I really reccomend this product if you are going for a winter scene. I did some more cars whilst I was working at the weekend so I’ll add more pictures of some other stuff in a post later in the week.

Oh looks like the postie is here so best be off, hopefully he has some materials for this weekens projects.

Yesterday you saw how i got the foam blocks in place that would support the WSOR mainline. Big square blocks don’t really conform to nature so I will need to add the embankment slope.

To do that I used a hot wire foam cutter to take about a 45 degree angle from the base to the top of the sides of each foam block.

I didn’t try to be too even as one its really hard to do free hand along a 4ft length of foam and his whole area will get covered in sculptamold before any scenery goes down here.

Carrying on from the first image in this one you can see that the profile has been cut into both sides of the foam block to form the embankment.

At the southern end of the yard I added a 2% grade, this is just for variety really but there are full trains that will need to negotiate this incline to access the WSOR Milwaukee sub during op sessions so I wanted the slope to be more gentle as this will be more than just dropping a few cars into or out of the yard as at the Northern End. In real life because of the grade crossing just north of the yard most switching and interchange is done at this southern end.

The raised WSOR mainline continues around the corner onto the next section of modules before the grade brings it down to level again with the CN before Rugby Junction. The highway overpass will cross the module about level with the leg seen to the left of the picture.

So now we await the arrival of a few bags of sculptamold and we will get this scene progressed.

Here finally is a complete overview of Ackerville with its base foam just placed onto the module tops. This will be a signature scene on the layout I am lucky to have such a long aisle in which to place it. Crews here will have plenty of room to complete their work.

Well its Friday so grab yoursleves a wobby pop or soft beverage of your choice and head back to your workbenches.

In a follow on from tuesdays post, which you can read here its time to put some scenery base in for the Ackerville scene. This is the rough building blocks that will be used to for lanscape features to support track, roads and structures.

I started by slicing 70-80mm strips of 20mm foam to use for the WSOR mainline which is elevated above the rest of the yard.

These square blocks were then place roughly in position with the turnouts at the yards Northern end.

To get from the WSOR mainline into the yard I cut section of foam with a grade of 4% to drop the main from 20mm to 0mm height in 500mm. A small inset section was cut into the 20mm thick foam to allow the two sections of foam to come together.

Here is a side view showing the incline and height of the WSOR above the yard and CN main. It looks quite high but based on the images I found the line is about one fright cars height above so this is actually a little lower than reality but 20mm feels right and we are already compressing the scene so perspective is important.

The foam does’t go all the way to the backscene so that there can be fall away before the tree line as it is in real life. I kept adding foam blocks until I reached the Southern end of the yard.

The next job will be cutting the slope of the embankment into both sides of the foam blocks join us tomorrow to see how that comes out.

As I said in my pevious post materials are low on the ground here at the moment, there are plenty of wee jobs to be getting done but there are not enough materials to actually finish anything. Therefore this is a post about drilling a hole so thats your hint to run give up reading the rest of this update.

The Plan

To support my backscenes and upper deck I need to use something, there are also challenges in so much as this is a modular layout it may have to come apart to move to a new room in the future. So we need to bear that in mind. we also don’t want to damage the walls of the room and don’t want anything to thick or heavy making the layout smaller.

Shelf layout folks have for a long time used twin slot shelving to mount their layouts and the same theory can be used to make a double deck modular layout. Of course we need to be mindful or the weight we are adding above deck one. By adding the short section of twin slot u channel we are adding a lever and anyone that has used a prybar to rip open a pallet will know the pros and in this case cons of doing that. Whatever force is applied to the uprights will be trying to rip apart the bottom module, so care is needed.

Backscenes & Upper Decks

The back scenes will be 3mm MDF i am still not sure on if these will be painted or photos but as I am planning on a winter scene for the layout then I think all options are open. Otherwise I would be reccomending photo backscenes all day long. Whats important here though is weight and well there won’t be much acting on the support from the backscene.

The upper deck will only be 120mm wide and cut from 15mm OSB this is heavy but its strong and won’t need any other supports underneath that means we can have that rail height only 250mm above our lower deck and have the backscene 228mm (9inches) high below it. Again not much weight. I may add a lighting deck to form a shadow box at the very top of the upright and so long as nothing is placed on here I think we will be fine. Also using metal uprights means I can use magnetic tape to have an easily removeable backscene without needing to dismantal the layout.

Where to Start

Well as always material is in short supply here in Orkney and I could only get 11 636mm uprights. I have used Elfa uprights for a number of years and these can be purchased in the UK from Iornmongrey Direct. It doesn’t really matter where you get your materials from but its important to stick with the same brand. Not all twin slot is created equal and pretty much no two brands play nicely together. Elfa is great for model railroaders because they do brackets from 120mm up to over 500mm which is really a very wide shelf layout. Also being 2mm thick steal they are strong and support a huge 55kg per bracket.

As we only have 11 of these I am also going to start with those in the most awkward place on the layout to access above the workshop area. This will involve dismantling part of the layout but once done there shouldn’t be a reason to repeat doing this for any future jobs as the magnetic tape will hold the backscene in place.

Out of the box each upright has three holes for screws 290mm apart. Thats grand for on a wall but for me that would mean only one screw per upright and thats a little much I think. So its time to get to drilling a hole. How much you’ve been looking forward to a blog post on drilling a hole, well here it is.

Right we have 11 of these now just enough to do along that back wall above the workbenchs, now I need to find an extra pair of hands to dismantle the layout.

Till tomorrow 🙂