Framing a Subject...

A great aspect of this hobby is about sharing. And by sharing, I don’t mean that meaningless unboxing carnival that has plagued modelling forums for the last few years, where everyone to ride the proverbial bandwagon in search of cheap attention. I’m talking about sharing musings about the hobby, its goals and philosophy. I recall Trevor Marshall often advocating hobbyists to enter the conversation by means of blogs and other such platform. While a good advice, I only started to appreciate this invitation to the public debate in later years. Writing a blog is a strange thing because you barely know who will be interested in your quests. So far, I’ve been blessed by many people that helped me shape my vision, providing both encouragement but also constructive criticism.

Developing a vision isn't a straightforward process...

Many years ago, I promised I would build a small layout depicting Connors, NB; a lovely Temiscouata Railway end-of-line station set in the St. John River valley on Maine’s border. However, I had a single condition to meet before starting this project: I need a clear artistic vision because I wanted it to be an impressionist piece, a layout with a soothing atmosphere, just like a well-executed painting.

A big part of this condition was conditioned by the way I would frame the scene. Until now, I had serious doubts how to do it, but thanks to Mike Cougill’s recent blog posts (one, two and three) about setting a layout in a room, I feel more confident in my work. That’s the nice thing with Mike, he has done enough in this hobby to be able to question the obvious. By doing so, not only he enable conversations, but also brings with it a level of sophistication we rarely see. Many modellers in the past influenced me and I’ve wrote about them a few time. They mainly confirmed my intuitions in providing coherent visions that shared many of my own observations. However, Mike’s influence doesn’t work like this. He is the kind of nagging little voice in your head asking “are you sure?” He isn’t aware of it, but his little voice guided me through the rebuilding of Clermont since last year. I no longer approach design as a set of steps to follow in order, but I now take a lot of time contemplating my work and looking how to make it better. It could have stalled me in a sort of paralysis; however, it provided in fact a reason to do better each time.

His recent posts triggered me to rethink about Connors as I am looking for a small and manageable home project. Many questions arose: how much layout, what to crop from the scene, how to frame the subject, how to work on it in a practical way, etc.

Interestingly enough, I’m coming close to a vision for this project. Like a professional photographer, I framed the subject from all possible angles, than worked on focus and lighting. I now feel I’m ready to shot the final picture. I suspect this picture will be blurry, kind of impressionist, with not so well defined borders. Light will be uneven, drastically enhancing some details and leaving others in the dark. Colors and textures will play an important role too and trains will be set in such a way they are the main actor on the stage. As you will discover in a future post, the framing goes beyond the scenic nature of this small layout and will also imply framing the action itself. I’m not sure many people attempted this artistic vision with pre-WW1 railways in Canada, but I sure feel it is a worthy pursue…

Rue Desbiens - In Place

The beauty with cardboard (or styrene) roads is they can be set in place in a matter of a few minutes and require almost virtually no excess work.

Now with this key grade crossing in place, we can start to better understand the dynamic of this specific scene. Roads are natural spots where the human world interacts with trains so they must be used with care so they can balance how we frame our subject.

With Desbiens Street, we discovered that an interesting spot right over the hills dividing the peninsula. It's always satisfying to discover multiple angles from a single scene, making the layout appears closer to a real world than a slice of roadbed.

Rue Desbiens

Making streets can be tiresome, but as some people have advocated for years (Mindheim, Gravett), it is often easier to model them at the benchwork using readily available material.

Once again, I'm not reinventing anything, only using a method that brought good results to me over the time. Also, I like when the layout has a visual coherence and for that, using the same materials and color palette helps a lot.

I've often thought roads on North American layouts look too good to be credible. When it's time to paint yellow and white lines, most will use full strength paint, which is far to yield a realistic appearance.

In my case, masking tape is used to frame the future lines. Then paint is kind of drybrushed to get a faded look. You don't want paint buildup along the tape. For yellow, I generally lighten the color with some white. After winter, lines are in bad shapes and not pristine if still visible at all.

When dry, I remove the tape then I use an hobby knife blade to scrape the paint. Don't be shy, the more you remove, the better it looks. Only leaving ghost lines is what we want. It is surprising how very worn out lines can still make a decent contrast with the adjacent asphalt color.

Then, a generous coat of dullcote seal everything while hiding the glossy hobby knife scratches.

Wieland - Scenery Progresses

A few weeks ago, scenery was going forward at a furious pace. Then, our DIY static grass applicator died. Electronics simply gave up and it was clear the cause was the cheap chinese components used to build it in the first place. This applicator was built about two years ago and saw less than 5 hours of use in that amount of time. This unfortunate event meant a forced hiatus that wasn't scheduled.

Green grass is mainly visible along the drainage ditch

However, I could take pictures of a step I rarely document here: how I prepare my ground cover.

Applying grass isn't a straight forward single action but rather the addition of several layers. Except if you want that clean and even look of a tidy green carpet.

Grass often dies quickly near switches due to pollution and drainage

I always start studying prototype pictures before committing to scenery. It's too easy to assume how things are and miss the subtleties of nature.

Before even applying grass, I generally paint a generous coat of brown latex paint to cover the ground. It blends everything together and provides a sound foundation for further scenery work. At this point, I will generally sprinkle some small rocks, debris and other similar junk to provide some roughness to the soil. While not visible under the grass cover, these elements will later provide some texture in the grass, making it more realistic.

The locomotive shed track is poorly maintained and dead grass is plenty.

A first step is generally to add white glue blobs along the ballast where grass has a hard time growing and dies. Tuffs of static grass are then dabbed into the wet glue and let to dry. I don't use an applicator since this dead grass is rarely standing perfectly upright. With the help of photos, I also repeat the same treatment in other areas where dead grass is expected. A rule of thumb would say that higher elevations and spots where water gets drained quicker are generally prone to be yellowish.

The transloading track is also another spot of neglect

After that, I repeat a similar step but this time using quite bright green grass (generally a Spring mix made by Noch is my memory serves me right). This time, still using pictures, I identify spot where grass is much greener. Mainly along the bottom of ditches, but also here and there in a quit of random pattern based of topography.

It is not rare at this point I'll sprinkle greenish ground foam over the new grass but also unscenicked areas. This add texture and relief, further enhancing the idea the grass cover is made of several layers of vegetation. This ground foam looks like very small plants and can truly bring life and color to the final results.

Highway ditches are generally well watered and vegetation thrives there

It must be noted I apply the dead and green grass tuffs before I applying the overall layer of static grass because these colors are quite garish and contrasted. The future layer will tone down the contrast and blend everything together. Later, dead leaves, vegetal debris and weeds will complete this blending into something compelling.

GP15-1: Ditch and Rock Lights

Time goes by and I can't believe it's been a month since my last post. This fall comes with a strange king of lassitude... even if work on the layout still progresses.

Nevertheless, our pair of GP15-1s are near to completion. Adding LED to rock and ditch lights is proving to be extremely challenging and far beyond what we expected. Installing so many lights can be quite a challenge and unfortunately, we discovered quite late some LED didn't have matching colors. If you think pico LED are all born the same, well it's not the case. It seems quality control wasn't seriously carried on by the manufacturer. Imagine, a few LED were clear white, some had a bluish hue and other a very yellow tint. It was unacceptable and some were removed.

However, the final result is quite impressive and well worth the efforts. We still need to add some fiber optic lenses on the rock light, but 1510 is almost done. At this rate, maybe all our locomotives will be ready to run by Christmas!