Modelling 122th Street - Part 4

Another productive club meeting yestarday. Among many other things, we managed to decide how the working class housing area will come together. Interestingly, we found out that we didn't need 11 structures to make it works. As you can see, this is quite enough to get the feeling right.

We added some mockups to see how it would look with more houses and the scene composition was starting to crumble apart. It was decided two other houses will be added on the other side of the road, but we won't expand the scene longitudinally.

As you can see, our trains now have a quite interesting backdrop in front of which they can operate.

Also, Jérôme decided to install the cement plant mockup once again to operate this part of the layout. I'd say it was a good decision because the room felt empty and it was a little bit depressing. Given I don't expect the model to be built before the end of the year, it's a more sensible decision.

I'm quite happy how the ballasted and weed-infested Villeneuve yard looks like the real thing since the cement plant is now back on the layout.

We also worked on menu details about Henri-Bourrasa overpass. Safety railing are almost ready to assemble. Oil piping connecting the pumphouse and oil reservoirs were also kitbashed from two Walthers oil loading platform. The scene is coming along well, but more on that later.

It was also decided trees in Villeneuve will have leaves (with a tender green tint characteristic of springtime). The reason is simple, we found out many of our scenes require trees to hide seems, awkward building transition with backdrop, etc. This can hardly be done with leafless deciduous trees. But be afraid, we are not changing the season. In fact, when studying the Clermont backdrop, it was clear many trees had already leaves. Since there is about a one to two week seasonal lag between Quebec City and Charlevoix, it makes sense indeed to have trees fully covered in leaves in Villeneuve.

And finally, I performed a operation session for the first time in many months. In fact, I don't recall the last time I was in charge of a train! I was quite surprised it took me more than two hours to do a full run and I wasn't following prototypical practices like setting handbrake and other such things... Once again, it's crazy how little track is required to sustain long operating sessions. If one was more prototypical and switched every industries as CFQ did, it would probably require about 3 hours to model the job. Quite impressive.