FINISHED*

There were still ground to cover after the pond was poured.

First, the most fun of all...

...Saucy Intruders

It would be a Northern Ontario layout without:

Imported (!) from Europe via Nashville (thank you James).

Close up next to his lodge :)

And another fella wandering a bit further in search of material for the lodge:

This is was all inspired by one of those amusing stories that kept us going during COVID about beavers stealing some lumber:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatchewan/porcupine-plain-beavers-stolen-posts-1.6023246

Finishing the scenery

And there was still some scenery in the foreground to finish as well. The photos show the layer approach to build up the scene:

Nothing fancy, just a mixture of texture and colour. I added a few large boulders to keep cars out (they might try to go around the rusty gate) and tinted the gravel to keep it dusty.

I am a huge fan of that gate - the rust effects come from some paints I bought at Michaels for $10. The gate came out that way on the first try! Also my first soldering project.

And I used some powdered pastels to tone down the chalky white rocks and give them some more character. These rocks were originally from an "odor remover" bag that you stick in your closet to keeping your hanging clothes from getting musty!

...Oops, missed a spot

And I also went back and took care of the spot I never filled in by the station parking lot. I think my plan was to put a scene in showing a truck repair. 

I added some ballast, ground cover and one or two plants to fill the gap.

I had gone over a year without noticing the bare spot, which tells you how unobtrusive the gap was in the first place.

And man, the pick up truck is driving real slow!

And a repair:

When I built the unloading shed for Generic Canneries, I left it unattached to the building. This was deliberate in case I wanted to re-use the structure down the road. To keep the shed upright, I "hung" it against the building using a well-hidden piece of wood. I found that the shed slipped out of position. Also, the clearance wasn't there for regular sized boxcars.

So I pulled the shed out and added supports:

I hesitated over the repair for a while because I didn't know how long the supports needed to be or even how to measure. The aisle side supports were not a good guide since they were a bit higher.

I got very lucky...

Although it is hard to see from the photo, the clearance is much better now that the shed "stands" on its own five feet.

So...what's next?

I don't know :). There is always something to do, like write another post about what is next!

But for now I can say that I captured the image I had in my head in 2018...in fact the end result is even better!

*Plus or minus 10%

 

 A Pond for Aston (Part II) 

With the pond bottom in place but a very chalky white, I then set about to paint it.

Unfortunately for the blog, I didn't take photos of the unscenicked pond after the bottom had been painted.

Dear Reader, this means that you will have to separate the two stages in your head when seeing the photos.

For the record, this was (mostly) done in August 2022 with finishing touches added in December.

Stage One - Painting the bottom

Fake water dries clear unless you tint it. Paint is needed to create the illusion of varying depth - the darker you go, the deeper the water. Paint also gives the impression of what kind of bottom - in learning about the water process, I saw videos where people lined the bottom of their water with sand and rock since they were modelling creeks.

I wanted a quiet pond. A quiet pond with some suggestion of belonging to a larger water structure (justifying the addition of some imported friends). So I went with a progressively darker bottom - dirty brown on the shore then progressing to a dark green in the center.

One of "mistakes" I thought I made was not making a flat bottom. Instead I used flexpaste to seal the bottom of the pond. This created some small ridges (you'll see them in the photos shortly) which I thought would take away from the idea of a soft mucky pond bottom.

While those fears proved over blown, I think I would have been better off using a bit of sand, especially in the shallow end.

The bottom 

Stage two - On the Shore

This photo shows the shore pretty much as it looked after the bottom was painted. I worked a bit of flexpaste in to smooth the transition between shore and pond.

Now...down to business...and layers.

Starting with a basic dirt base, I worked in a variety of materials and textures. 

The above photo shows several of these textures. The dark brown is Earl Grey tea (!), the flakey pieces from a spice kit, the grey rock was a leftover from plaster casting, the (overly) white rocks from a closet freshener (!) and the cattails were purchased. I added some bramble (the small green shrub) from Woodland Scenics. Away from the shore, you see the base of dirt/brown ground foam bringing us to the road.

I added some small yellow-ish rocks to the shore (probably my least favourite part), more bramble/shrubs, sticks and some (commercial) brush. I created some separation between the driveway and the pond with relatively high grass.

Again, scenic theory: 

1. Work in layers.

2. Use different textures/materials...

3. ...but keep the colours muted so nothing sticks out, and

4. add a bit of height with some shrubs, but not so much that it overwhelms the scene.

When done properly, you end up with scenery that looks compelling and natural. The grass between the track and the drive way is shorter than the grass between the more "remote" and less travelled area between drive way and pond. I created a few breaks in the grass to show where people might walk (at the switchpoint being the best example. If I was truly on my game, I would have added a small path to the pond for eager anglers...oh well.

Keep in mind, the depth of the scene is 6 inches from the barnboard to the track! But hopefully, the eye can't tell because of the composition and texture. 

The additional complexity here is that I would be pouring the water last so I needed to ensure the "shore" was "flow friendly" for the latex - in other words, there weren't any bumps or obstacles to the flow of the latex. 

Stage Three - Pouring the water

With scenery complete, I then bought caulk to seal the area between the "bottom" and the barn board framing. Of course I made this more complicated than it needed to be by not buying clear caulk the first place. After hastily cleaning up an initial seal using white caulk, I went back to Home Depot and looked more carefully at the tiny print. 

Then I sealed...

And then I began pouring the water. For the first layer or two, I tinted the water, perhaps a little heavily, to get the "tea stained" look I wanted.

...oh s***! I forgot that there were holes in the barnboard...which became evident when the "water" oozed out of the holes. I managed to clean the mess off the floor in time, but the oozing meant that the water did not dry flat.

I used a lot of caulk repeatedly (see the photo below) and finally created the seal.

The saving grace is that the thin pours (I believe I did 4 or 5 in total) gave ample opportunity to pour into the gaps.

That was the hard part. Everything else was pretty easy. I had to work in the water around the cattails and over some rocks but my good planning meant the work ins were minimal. There weren't even many bubbles - not sure what to attribute that to, but perhaps the thin pours.

(I know the detail is a bit boring but this blog is partially intended to remind me of how I did things).

I will add more in a further post, but here is the end result (the first two were taken during the curing process):

In my next post, I'll write about some of the details added to the pond, some final touch ups...and finishing the layout...!!!

 A Pond for Aston (part I)

"Fake" water is an entirely new area of model railroading for me. Canada is full of lakes and rivers and a layout without some kind of water is like a hockey player who doesn't have a nickname ending in "ie" or "y".

So fake water was a last task I set for myself. The water itself is a one or two-part epoxy that dries into a clear, hard surface. You can model a wavey lake, a rippley river or a sedate pond. The first two are challenging and the last was more or less what I wanted (Aston Lake though can get quite wavey).

I purchased a one-part epoxy and some dye. Ponds in Ontario are rarely clear - on fishing videos, water colour is described as "tea-stained". That was the effect I wanted.

First, let's look at the space (photo taken in June 2022!):

I took out the pink foam to the plywood to have a level surface. This meant, however, that I had a 2 inches of depth - too deep for the fake water. To build up the bottom, I used styrene strips (the orange is glue for the foam board bottom that was to be installed.

Testing

According to the literature, the keys for a successful water effect are:

1. A perfectly level surface.

2. Thin pours (i.e. at most an 1/8 inch at a time).

3. Ensuring the epoxy penetrates through scenic objects (I'll illustrate this later).

4. Attention to bubbles during the setting stage.

5. Watching out for shrinkage.

There was another key, which I was to discover later to my chagrin.

That's a lot to keep track of. That meant a practice run. I took some spare MDF and foam and built a sample pond. I experimented with various kinds of scenery to see how the "water" settled in (from here on in I'll stop using the quotes - water = epoxy). I also added a visitor, imported from Austria, that we will discuss in a further installment.

These pictures were taken before the water cured into a clear state. They illustrate some of the challenges - bubbles that needed to be popped (hence the lighter), the need to work the epoxy over and behind rocks and the tall grass) and getting the colour right - tea stained but not sludgy.

The testing was done over the August 1 weekend - showing the slow pace of this project.

Bottoming out the Pond

But let me go back to mid-June, when I put the bottom in the pond:

I was paranoid about how the epoxy would react to the foam board bottom so I covered it in flex paste.

Preview to Part II

After the August 1 test run, I painted the pond bottom and added scenery - the water would come last. I didn't take pictures of the pond bottom before I added scenery, so here is a glimpse, pre-pour:

Random diversions on the road to completion

The section bordering Nowhere Road is the last significant scenic area to be filled in. This is a sad feeling for since the greatest sense of accomplishment is the addition of something new to the layout - like when I placed Aston Growers on the layout after a 4-5 month project.

So I've had to content myself with little things while I aim for the completion of the last part.

Aston is now Aston

Believe it or not but one of the longest struggles I had was to create a "name board" for Aston station.

What font should it be?

What size font?

What about letter spacing?

Here is Snelgrove station:

Two different sign types! And what is the font on the side of the station. I spent months looking for the answer and couldn't find anything. So in the end, I tried a variety of fonts and came out with this:

Good enough, I'd say.

Scenic texture

I added some junk to the foreground scene near Nowhere Road:

...and a gate to the men's clubhouse. My first soldering project! And the dollar store "rust paint" set did an amazing job making the gate look elderly.

...subtle scenic wildflowers

And finally...ran some trains:

All of the above is activity that took place between May and July.

The next (and pretty much final) step is a very involved project to fill and scenic the pink hole: