Over river, underbrush

To start off, here's the real Tenbridge, seen from the Tennessee Riverpark near Chickamauga Dam, followed by my roughly one-third size version:



Obviously it's not an exact replica; the idea is just recognizeability, without taking up 12 feet of basement space.

I have had to suspend operations to do more landscaping, which I should have done a long time ago. I put it off because I wanted to run trains and try out the Filemaker freight traffic system.

Anyway, I have been putting down wisps of polyfiber, spraying them with hairspray and dusting with grass powder. This makes pretty convincing underbrush and especially kudzu, that Korean vine that has taken over so many hillsides and roadsides in the Southeastern U.S. There is a ton of it in Chattanooga, draping dead trees and making them into gigantic topiary sculptures during the summer.

Here's an example of how fast the stuff grows: I was out one summer looking at trains on the CSX tracks near Cromwell Road in Chattanooga, and found it growing right up the roadbed and over a rail of the main line! Between the rails were lots of cut-off ends of the vines. So it is was growing over the rails between trains! At least that's what it looked like.

So here's how some parts look right now. None of the industries is totally finished, but some are getting close. The two big destinations on the main line, Little Katie Snacks and Dixie Flour, have not even been started yet.



First off , here's Ergon Terminaling. The dry-bulk loading equipment is in place, as is the main office/warehouse, pump house for the big storage tanks, "asphalt" drive and walkway out over one of the barge bulkheads. I also weathered the bulkheads with some rusty pastel and filled them with riprap.



Next up is GEO Specialty Chemicals, with its buildings weathered and the settling pond completed. The settling pond (note the outflow pipe from nowhere) was painted with Folk Art Acrylic paint (el cheapo) and is being glossed up with acrylic gloss medium (expensivo). The box car contains drums of sulfuric acid, being used in the reactor to make aluminum sulfate out of fly ash.



Moving right along, here's Commercial Metals Inc., which takes in gondolas of scrap and loads it on barges. It was the first industry to be completed.



Here's a big closeup of Tenbridge again.



This is Colco Furniture, with its plastic-pellet unloading dock in place but unweathered. If you look closely, you can see that the back section of the factory is nothing but a big hunk of 2X4! The front is half of a plastic factory kit that I split down the middle (the other half will be Rock-Tenn Corp.)



Finally, here are two views of the branch line where it crosses North Chickamauga Creek on the light-duty trestle. That's the main line crossing in the background. The switcher, an MP15-DC, has not yet been painted in Norfolk Southern livery. I would like to get another one to lash up, but that's far down the road. The tanker is an empty, headed for Ergon Terminaling. Note the acrylic-gloss water!



The trestle is completely scratchbuilt out of 1/8 dowel and strip wood. The close-spaced-tie bridge track is from Micro-Engineering, the same thing I used for Tenbridge.