More sculptamold goes down

I am getting back onto putting more Sculptamold down so that I can get going on the scenic detailing of the back side of the railroad. Firstly, I had to cope with the tine gap along the window cill. As I can't do anything permanent to the walls (we rent the apartment) everything that I do has to be held separate from the wall, etc. here I had a little problem. There is a very small gap along behind the railroad - no more than 1" at its greatest. It is interesting that the gap gets smaller as it goes along but, on testing, neither the window cill or the railroad baseboard seem to be out! In any case no freight car rolls on the rails when placed so I will stop worrying about it. I found an image of a wooden fence on the internet. I put this into photoshop. I trimmed it and patched it into a long line. I also put some scenery behind the fence but it turned out that very little of that could be seen. Then, using Adobe Illustrator, I placed this on a sheet of paper with as many copies as I could fit and printed it all out. Each line looked like this:

Securing these to some foam board using double side tape gave me a nice background under the cill.

I then cut out a couple of pieces of foam board to match the floor of both the freight house and the station building. The idea was to raise these up so that they were at the right level against the track taking in the height of the foam road bed and to give a flat area to fix them in place when I get to them. I then started to ladle Sculptamold onto the baseboard being very careful when placing it near to the ballast.

Stopping for a while, I got out my plaster bandage (Mod Roc as it is called in the UK) and, using some old newspaper, built up a hill in the right hand corner of the layout.

In the image above, I have started covering the bandage with Sculptamold.

It is all starting to go together. When it is dry, I will paint it to match the rest of the groundwork. I need to make a platform for the passengers (remember that the station building is derelict). I am planning on a simple wooden plank structure which would have been seen as sufficient in the 1950s. I also need to make a tarmac base for the working area of the freight house and then put a small road in that goes off to the left behind some trees. Just to finish, I thought I would show you the derelict station in situ (I have added a Keep Out sign to the door).

Change of heart with the Pine Valley Station Building

If you go back a couple of posts, you will find that I had a story regarding the station building at Sunset. I was trying to build a legend to cover the fact that the building was a little too small for its supposed location at the main station for the railroad. I had a lot of problems with the roof of the structure, mostly because I used a water based glue to fix the shingles rather than the recommended double sided tape. The result was that the roof warped very dramatically. I have finally got it fixed but in the process came up with a better idea. here goes:

Up until the lat 1920s, the Sunset and North Eastern ran a small passenger service across the line from Boston to Hartford. With the Wall Street crash, the passenger traffic all but disappeared and eventually they closed up the station building as they finally decided to stop all coach traffic on the line. That's how it stayed until the birth of the RDC. The New Haven bought some of these and realised that they could have a quicker route to Boston than the current route over their own and the B&M tracks if they got some trackage rights over the S&NE. Suddenly, the S&NE had to make some provision for passengers at Sunset. The station building was, by now, too run down to resurrect so they did the simple thing - the put a platform down and left it to the New Haven to manage ticketing, etc. on the RDCs.

I got this idea from trips I have made on the New Haven. I have a business colleague/friend who lives in Windsor Locks, CT. I have made a few trips into New York with him. The "station" at Windsor Locks is just a car park and a slightly raised platform about 50' long.

Anyway, I am some way into completing the building. It still needs some extra weathering and settling onto its platform and then settling the whole thing into the ground. This is where I am:

Sunset Passenger Station (partly derelict)

I have blocked all the windows up. I am going to put a few warning signs around. It should end up looking quite good, I think.