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.

Still more about creating the landscape

I spent today's session laying the last of the roadbed supply, then went to get more before work. Plenty to do tomorrow, now!

I also did some more carving, mostly forming the river shore on the branch line right by Commercial Metals and Ergon Inc. I cut the 1" foam at an angle to form bits of river, hopefully enough to suggest a large body of water lying just "beyond the layout," and put in the actual river surface in the form of foam core board that I had lying around. Will post pictures soon -- we're due for a progress gallery.

To blend the banks into the water, I used lightweight spackle. I have been using the same stuff to form "fillets" between the track-level ground and the bottoms of the foam hills, in order to blend them together a little bit and not have these abrupt corners. It doesn't stick to foam all that well, and is kind of like trying to spread cake frosting on a floured board. But with a very light touch it is workable, and it sticks and sands well when it dries.

The ditch-carving described in the last post will take quite some time, as it involves a lot of thinking as well as a lot of doing. Where would the water drain here? Does this look realistic? Am I overdoing it? I am also trying to add a little texture and "undulation" to places on the foam board where things are just a little too flat and table-like.

Getting into the finer points of foam carving

The holidays are over, the rough building of the foam terrain is complete, and I am even well into -- shock -- the laying of the cork roadbed. In fact the whole branch line is roadbedded, thanks in part to the help of young K. and C., who have learned how to soak, cut, curve, glue and pin the cork. A valuable life skill, to be sure.

I am now stopped due to lack of materials, as we're down to one more piece of cork and the purchasing department needs to make a trip to the hobby store.

In the meantime, however, there's plenty to be done.

The laying of the roadbed has enabled the carving of ditches, which has led me into all kinds of other interesting fine landscape shaping. Yes, a lot of that has been done already, but this is much finer detail stuff.

The best way to carve ditches, so far, is to roll a small rectangle of rough grit sandpaper into a cylinder about the size of a cigarette butt. You then simply rub it along the side of the roadbed (after the glue's dry of course), making pass after pass until you're down to the depth of ditch you want. Then get a square of finer sandpaper and smooth the whole thing down.

The effect of this is wonderful. The roadbed suddenly seems like more of a part of the landscape. The landscape thus begins to "embrace" the railroad in that wonderful realistic way. Instead of a track glued down to a board, you will now have a transportation route traversing a landscape with its obstacles.