Agrivoix and Painting Rocks

 
Coop Agrivoix is now complete and weathered. The structure nicely blend with its surrounding and I'm quite happy with the results even if installing the window glazing in the office space was extremely tricky and frustrating.

The Coop is small but can receive two cars at a time. By the mid-80s, it was not a major rail customer and for this reason, operation will be light in this district.

However, the new team track is gonna be extremely busy and it's why I altered the access road so I can have a longer unloading/loading area for the team track. I was able to get about 30 scale feet more and to get rid of unsightly bumps in the road.

The next big challenge was painting the plaster rock with acrylic washes. I followed the Woodland Scenics "leopard" approach but altered the technic to suit my needs. I worked with prototype pictures to make sure I got the brownish tone with iron streaks typical of Charlevoix.

We are quite satisfied how it turned out for a first try and more final scenery work is going to start soon. Louis-Marie is preparing ingredients to make forested area ground cover and he sifted quite a lot of rock to make ballast.

Jérôme was also busy improving the track reliability in Clermont. He worked a lot of the turnout and relaid the team track to be level. We found out the layout wasn't perfectly horizontal. There is a very faint grade when leaving Clermont that I calculated to be 1%. It's quite funny because we found out in the past when using very heavy freight car that trains had a harder time leaving Clermont than arriving. Now we know why.

That unexpected grade isn't a bad thing because grade on Murray Bay Sub were mainly located between Pointe-au-Pic (La Malbaie) and Clermont. We suspect some structure sagging is responsible for that new realistic operating challenge. Who would have thought it was the reason why the team track cars always rolled down instead of staying in place!