building

An engaging build - part 4

Continued from part 3...

I've not detailed how I built the station, the church, and Rachel's Building. The remaining builders are either kitsets, or more of the same, so I won't bother going into detail on them. What I will talk about though is something fun Rachel and I did shortly after the grande-reveal, which is adding street lights.

We selected our street lights on eBay, and then patiently waited for them to arrive. Then it was all hands to the deck as we set about installing them.

First off we decided where we wanted lights, marked their locations, and drilled some holes. Now we needed to poke the wires and lamp pole down through the base, and through 2 inches of polystyrene. Simply pushing the wires down wouldn't work, the sharp tips of the wires would soon decide to head off in dif...

Station tracks almost completed

Well, at long last, I have the track down on my station entrance module.

I still need to glue it all down and securely attach the track at the end of the module, but the middle part is all done. Underneath there are about 30,000 wires attached to every piece of track; hopefully this means there will be no stalls as trains negotiate the many points.

And here is a short of the Narita Express negotiating the turnouts to move onto the first platform track.

The sheer number of tracks is quite impressive. It starts off as two through tracks and expands out to 10 tracks at the o...

City scene continues to take shape

A month since my last update on the city scene! Yikes. Progress continues in a haphazard fashion, broken here and there by trips to Christchurch. A while back my wooden sleeper stock arrived, ready for cutting and gluing. After a few misadventures I decided the best way to assemble them was:

Print out a full size template. Coat with spray on adhesive. Place the turnout over the template and mark where the PCB sleepers are. Hopefully they line up with the sleepers on the template! Often I found they didn't which made things interesting. Remove the turnout. Place the stripwood on the template, trim to length, press into the glue. Rinse and repeat. Once all done, stick the turnout to the ties.

St...

Making snow

To prepare my module for snow I started the slow process of building up a base for the snow. To start with I wanted the snow nice and level with the tracks, as per the original inspiration photo. I grabbed the nearest caulking gun and squirted out big fat beads along the track, then with a putty knife and some water smoothed it off nice and level.

To simulate piles of plowed snow, I crushed up some dried plaster and embedded it in the caulk while still soft:

To disguise these mounds I mixed up some sloppy plaster and drizzled it over the top. Much sanding, filling, more sanding, painting, smoothing, sanding followed. At the same time, I experimented with snow materials:

Woodland Scen...

Illuminating my first city building

In between making points, I've been playing with some of my recently acquired buildings. I decided to tackle a small one initially to get the feel for things. First step was to dismantle the building, something Kato have made fairly easy. I dug out some LED strip tape, which unfortunately had green LEDs. It was a simple enough job however to desolder them and solder on some tiny replacement white LEDs.

While at it, I put some blue LEDs into the end spot so that the stairwell would be a different colour. Then I drilled holes and made space for the lights and mounted a row for each floor. Some more holes at the back to run the wires down.

City scene takes shape

It's official: the long-rumoured, oft-hinted, city scene has finally started to take shape.

Trackwork

The Utrainian Workshops have been busy churning out points for the complicated yard ladder trackwork; that is, the tracks that will route trains from two main lines onto one of eight platform lines. To further complicate matters, the station trackwork is all located on a curve to maximise the available space for the station platforms.

For the first set of points, I drew out the plan full size and used pieces of flexi-track and a length of metal to trace out the curves and track centrelines. I then traced these onto other bits of paper and painstakingly built up the points over these rough outlines.