how easy it is to paint backdrops

Seriously, it's so scary to contemplate painting a backdrop. But as long as you have a small "fan brush", some grey paint and some green paint, you can have one in just a couple of hours. (That's assuming you have something the right size to paint on - in this case a friend brought me this surplus sheet of 0.1" (2mm) styrene after he was done with his backdrops, which happened to be the right height, so it basically fell in my lap.) Five layers of paint total: Distant mountains (light grey), closer mountains (slightly darker light grey), distant trees (forest green lightened with a little white), and closer trees (forest green). I found that the layers dried enough in about 2 hours that I got the whole 8' piece of 0.1" styrene done in one day of intermittent bursts of painting, while I was doing lots of other things (while also "stuck at home" due to the pandemic, of course). Here's the photographic evidence.

 Above is the whole sheet of styrene laid out on the workbench, with a layer of "distant grey" slapped on there. Below is a section showing the application of "closer grey" applied just in one area, since the whole thing will be mostly covered up by trees.

Now we see the wet second layer of slightly darker green on top of the lighter green. Just a subtle difference in shade is enough to get the effect.

It's absolutely amazing how much this simple thing improves the operation of my simple On30 shelf layout. I wish I had thought of this back when I started building it over a dozen years ago!

It would look even better if I would change out the lighting from the old incandescent Christmas tree bulbs to modern LED strips with a more realistic color temperature. Some day!

on putting tracks too close to the edge

Yesterday I was enjoying the fruits of my labor by doing some switching on my N scale layout, when the side of my hand accidentally brushed up against a top-heavy "sky box" car, and it (and several other cars coupled to it) promptly fell off the edge of the layout down on top of the staging yard, derailing a bunch of cars in both trains there. It's not a pretty picture, although at least there was no physical damage to anything.

You can see from the above picture that several cars would have fallen to the floor, had I not recently installed a plexiglass guard at the edge of the staging yard. Now, it is painfully clear that I need another guard at the edge of the upper yard. The next picture shows the gruesome incident from another angle, and a piece of plexiglass on the yard lead already begging to be installed.

Fortunately, I had some leftover strips of 2" wide plexiglass from building the water underneath the HO MILW car barge, so it didn't take too long to measure them, drill holes for the mounting screws (very carefully, using a drill press to minimize the risk of cracking the plexiglass), and install them. I use "fender washers" behind the screws to spread out the pressure on the fragile plexiglass. I don't know what took longer, installing the shields, or getting all those cars back on the track!

The glare from the shields is not ideal, but neither was that derailment in the staging yard. Here's a final picture take from across the other side of the layout, showing that you can barely notice the shield is there, and then only if you're really looking for it.

N scale pulp and paper mills ready for ops

As of today, the tracks are in and operations can begin on the new Everett pulp and paper complex.

Of course there are many decisions yet to make about the structures themselves, pavements, details and so forth, but in the meantime we can start to service these plants with operations and see how it goes. In the second photo, the function of each track is as follows, from left to right:
(1) chemicals in to paper mill (tank cars)
(2) additives (kaolin etc.) in to paper mill (cov. hop.)
(3) paper out (covered track) (boxcars)
(4) paper out (uncovered track) (boxcars)
(5) pulp out (boxcars)
(6) additives for pulp plant (and waste products out?) (cov. hop. & tank & box)
(7) switcher pocket and clean-out track
(8) wood chips unloading (wood chip gons)
(9) pulp wood unloading (gons and bulkhead flats)

The track just below the switcher, and probably the siding below it, will probably be used for staging incoming and outgoing cars for the passing local trains to have someplace to pick up or set out. The switcher will do all the in-plant work. At least that's the plan.

I would to thanks Joe Green, Jerry Green and Mark Dance for inspiring me to add this mill complex to my N scale layout. Their models of such mills are outstanding, and once I saw them in person I had to have one.

Here are a couple more shots of the complex, from different angles:

N scale steel mill massing study

While we're doing "massing studies" (see previous post on the pulp and paper mill) I took a look at the site for the West Seattle Nucor steel mill on my new five inch wide addition to the N scale layout. I think it's going to work out, although the site is ridiculously condensed for a steel mill model. The back track will be for scrap in (mostly in gons), the middle track will be for the shipping department (mostly gons and bulkhead flats) and the short front track will be for additives in and bag house dust out (mostly covered hoppers and covered gons). All tracks will go into - and be covered by portions of - the building(s).

Here's option 1, from three different perspectives:

It might be a little tall, considering the hill behind it (although that could be fixed by putting a backdrop between it and the hill). Also, this shows the additives and bag house track out in the open, but they probably should be covered.

So, here is option 2, a little longer and less high, from two angles:

I think this second alternative seems better. But it doesn't look complex enough, and we still haven't covered the third track for bag house dust and additives. So, here's alternative 3:

I like it, for now. Although it might make more sense to set up an overhead crane on the left, between the first two tracks, to symbolize the movement of scrap in and product out. Another day we can try looking at that. Let me know your ideas on all this...

a massing study for the N scale pulp and paper mill

The next step in remodeling the N scale layout is figuring out how to model a pulp and paper mill in the new wider and longer shelf in Everett. Scott Paper Co. is the obvious target, but the layout of my layout is so different from the Everett waterfront that I'm going to have to do a freelanced design. Before laying down any track, I thought it would be good to play with blocks and get an idea how it would work. Here are a couple of shots from various angles of my first concept. I like it so far, but will sleep on it and wait for any comments the rest of you might have.

There is a balance between having the buildings big enough to look real, but not so big as to dwarf the rest of the layout. This looks about right, to my eye. Here's another angle:

The tracks I'm planning, from right to left, are (1) wood chips in, (2) pulp wood in, (3) chemicals and additives in, (4) pulp shipping, (5) paper shipping outside, (6) paper shipping inside, and (7) additives and chemicals for the paper side. With this layout it looks like we could have a two track "canyon" between the two plants for shipping boxcars of pulp and paper on their respective sides. And if I stagger the buildings a little, as shown, the paper shipping track could be longer than the pulp shipping track, which makes sense, since most of the pulp would go directly over to the paper mill. I plan a large sawdust pile behind the two buildings, but haven't added that to the massing study yet.

Anticipating future success, I've also been preparing a fleet of wood chip cars to make sure the plant is well supported when the track is finally laid. :)

Here's a second version of the massing study. I got to thinking that it would be nice to have a better view down the "canyon" between the pulp building and paper building, so I rotated the whole thing. Also added a couple of kush balls to stand in for the sawdust pile, and switched the wood chip track with the pulp wood track. I like this second version a lot better.

Here's the view down the "canyon"

 Looks good from the front. The pulp wood track is in front now, and the wood chip track has enough length for those long gons next to the sawdust pile.

Better composition from the end view

And the street view shows great promise, too!

N scale demolition part 2

The N scale project currently underway is basically to flatten more areas on the layout, to allow more industries and spurs to improve operational fun. Now that I have all the demolition and construction tools mobilized, it's difficult to stop. Here are some photos of additional areas of the N scale layout that are getting "flattened":

This area of "Everett" is a gentle slope that, if flattened, could be a factory with railroad spurs.

Using a Dremel "Multi-Max MM35" with a front-facing saw-blade attachment, I was able to easily rip a hole in the plaster and cardboard scenery and remove it.

This left a gaping hole in the layout, so I screwed in a plywood splice place from underneath the layout (to make future changes possible if needed) and cut another piece of plywood to completely cover the hole

Then it was a matter of inserting foam trim pieces using a low-temperature hot glue gun. Once these are trimmed and the whole area is covered with sheet cork, painted and textured, you'll never know it wasn't always there, ready for development!

A note on making revisions with plywood scraps. When I built this layout in 1980, 1/2" plywood was exactly that. 1/2". 40 years later, "1/2"" plywood is actually 7/16" thick. Which is great for the profits of plywood companies, but is not great for model railroad remodelers. This means that I now have an annoying 1/16" lip between plywood pieces to somehow smooth over. I suppose I could have used shims to prevent this, but as usual I'm pushing myself to get the project done, not to get it perfect. I like to preach the mantra "no short-cuts", but I don't always practice what I preach.

Now let's turn to the "Mukilteo" area of the layout. I originally built this area using Midwest cork roadbed nailed down to plywood, with Atlas N scale code 80 track nailed on top of it. Here's a picture of the area after I removed the factories, but not the track.

The layout of this track made sense to me at the time (40 years ago), but I was never able to make good use of the area, especially with that huge ballast shoulder created by the cork roadbed in the middle of an industrial area. Now I understand that I should have covered the whole area with cork sheet and then it would have been easier to add roads and make adjustments to track arrangements without messy scenery alterations.

The advantage of using roadbed and track nails on the original layout was that it took me all of 10 minutes to easily remove those two tracks and roadbed, clearing the way for removing any unneeded plaster from the plywood surface.

These two photos show the area after applying the "multi-max" tool. This time I plan to apply sheet cork and some more prototype-based industries. For example, there can be a long spur to represent the Boeing factory at Paine Field, and two tracks to represent the Standard Oil transloading facility that existed along the Puget Sound shore and was served by the local train called the "Oiler".

One last comment on the lower photo - you can see some shaved-off scenery and bare cork roadbed in the lower left-hand corner. This track now comes from an area of the main yard which I've called "Burlington" and represents the "Concrete Branch" which ran east into the Cascade Mountains. I am planning to extend this track an additional 4' so that it can be set up to actually operate as a branch line. In the intervening 40 years, I've become interested in the various prototype trains that operated in this area, which leads to track changes to improve operations.