Wieland: Some Progress

Some people could think the layout project is on hiatus, however it do progress every week. I would like to post more about what we are doing, but it would be basically a bunch of guys trying to shape Styrofoam and fiberboard into a decent looking topography. Otherwise, it would be about prepping, priming and painting drywall. These subjects have already been covered in previous posts about Villeneuve and I don’t feel like repeating myself.

New ditches near General Cable plant.

However, I’d like to note that while these subjects are extremely mundane they do matter. Particularly since model railroading requires us to do things in reverse. In real life, the topography already exists and the roadbed is then built upon it. On a layout, tracks and roadbed come first and makes us forget too often about the subtle variations that are conflated as an hypothetical flat land.

For this reason, we are carefully shaping the landforms using data we gathered on a field trip last year. Such things as track bed geometry, ditches and surrounding land levels are replicated as best as we can. As you can guess, some artistic license is required, but the goal is to grasp the feeling of the place which can be boiled down to a set of a roadbed surrounded by shallow ditches filled with dead grass and shrubs. Add to this a slightly raised road parallel to the track and you got a good idea of what we are looking forward.

Small ditches can make a huge difference.

Since Wieland is basically in the middle of nowhere, the only compelling way to achieve great results is by a clever use of colors and textures. This is going to be quite interesting… at least I hope so.

Roadbed must feel as if it was built upon the original topography

On another note, our DCC installation projects are on the right track. The last few issues with speakers have been solved with some baffles. Sound installation can be quite tricky and ones must not fear to experiment and start from scratch when results aren’t good. At this rate, I suspect our fleet will be fully functional next spring.