Riverbank Scenery and April 2010 Status
April was a fairly busy month. The Urban Station scene received a tram line, and had the viaduct station structure finished. I also built the second level of the unsceniced return curves at the far end of the layout. And then I began working on the other bank of the large river (I’d done the far bank back in February).
I hadn’t done much on the riverbank by the end of the month, although it’s progressed a bit since then. The temporary expressway has been “completed” with the addition of some construction paper guardrails and support beams, as well as being lowered 1.5 cm. I’ve also rough-cut the foam that will go under it, although it needs to be trimmed back a bit, and then shaped to provide a levee up to the level of the bridge crossing the river, with a sloping hillside above it.
Atop the hill will be a pair of buildings, tall enough to rise well above the expressway (I might add a third over on the left, if it will fit once I finish the road). These help reduce the apparent size of the expressway, and partially hide the end of the scenic divider. A small park will occupy space between the river and the road in front of the buildings, in the space roughly outlined by the trees in the photo above.
The two buildings are Kato “built-up six floor office/department store, modular design” (23-434A and 23-434B) structures, but with a second pair of floors added to make them eight stories tall. I had to buy a second building of each to get the extra floors (I can re-use the remainder as a four-story building elsewhere). The empty floors are really obvious, so I’m eventually going to have to do something to detail the interiors.
Now that I have the rough outline down, I need to finish shaping the foam, paint it and glue down the two hillside sections, and create the “roof” for the subway, which will also serve as the base for the road and park atop the hill. Although I’d been thinking of moving on to the Riverside Station scene, I think I’m going to get this area to the glued-and-painted stage before doing so. Hopefully I’ll finish that by the end of the month.
Running trains still seems as far away as ever. I’ll be at the one-year anniversary of beginning the planning of this layout in late June. Maybe I’ll be able to celebrate with an inaugural run. I’m really glad I managed to run some trains back in February when I finished the subway track (before I took it all up to paint the cork and do other scenery work).
Other website changes:
- I created an Expressway page to illustrate the design of the temporary expressway.
- I’ve updated the Construction photo album with pictures showing how the expressway segments were built.
- I’ve update the Scenery photo album with pictures of the river bank (the above photo and others).
- I added a diagram of the expressway construction to the Diagrams photo album.
- I’ve updated the River Crossing scene page so it now has photos of both sides of the river.
- I’ve updated the “phase 2e” construction page with some of the same photos showing this stage of the ongoing construction (the construction pages won’t change once material is added to them, while other pages may be edited later to change them to reflect the current status of what they’re showing.
- I also made a few other changes to add some of these pages to indexes or references on other pages.
