The last couple of weeks have been mainly spent on the initial scenery for the “Village” part of the River Crossing scene. This consisted of carving and gluing foam, making and painting bridge abutments, laying plaster cloth (seen above) and filling in various gaps, applying a stone texture to the face of the sloped sections of embankment, and laying cork where the track goes. There’s a fairly detailed explanation with lots of photos on the “Phase 2c” page of the Construction section. I’ve also added most of the photos from that page to the Construction photo album, so you can see close-up details of them.

I’m still not done. Before I set this section aside to work on another, I want to paint the white parts, and finish off a few rough areas. I’m not going for final scenery yet (e.g., no grass, trees or shrubs), and the buildings will be just loosely placed on the gray areas, rather than a final road/sidewalk structure being finished. But I want this to look like something other than insulation foam for the next few months, while I work on the other parts of the layout. I’ll update the “phase 2c” page in a week or two, and add photos to the Construction photo album when it’s worth looking at. I’m also going to add fascia boards (masonite) to hide and protect the edges of the foam on this scene, as I don’t want to bump into it hard enough to break anything, and clearances are fairly tight on the corners (I’ve hit the rear hills several times already).

My next goals are to get the Urban Station track finalized, and the Riverside Station foam glued down, so I can build the plywood structure at the far end that links those two, giving me working top-side loops for the Commuter and Rapid/Shinkansen lines (the Subway loop is already working, when it isn’t blocked by construction debris). Realistically, I’m hoping that I will be running trains on those loops by May, which is less than a year from when planning started (I didn’t get serious until July of last year, and actual construction started in late August).

Other site updates:

• I’ve added an “overview” page to the collection section, so that it’s easier to see all of my trains and the most important details about them in one place. The original pages with more complete information still exist, and are linked from that page and other places.

• I’ve added two new trains to my collection: the Tōkyō Metro 10000 subway train, and the E653 Fresh Hitachi Limited Express (the extra 10% off Hobby Search was offering this month was too much temptation). The Collection pages have been updated for both.

• I’ve rearranged the list on the Home page again, and added pages for each of the scenes on the layout (Riverside Station, Urban Station, and River Crossing), which will document the current state of that scene (the Construction “phases” pages will continue to document the history of the scenes are they are constructed.

• I’ve created a page for backdrop photos (which I’ll use to collect various open-licensed images I may use for my backdrops). At the moment it’s still fairly empty.

• I added an example image of a “signal for two routes” to the Signal Examples page. This is a different style from the route-signaled example shown on the wikipedia page on Japanese Signals, but one common as an exit signal from a station where there are two possible routes.

• I’m continuing to convert the older pages from 12-point type to 14-point (which is used on all my new pages to make it more legible on a web page).

Tags: Construction, River Crossing, Foam, Scenery