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:

 Yet another post on Nowhere Road

(Still nowhere near completion)

For a month, the road sat in limbo. The glue dried, leaving a sort of perpetually damp sheen on the road. Not what I was looking for.

Before I could fix the look of the road, I worked on the scenery around the road, figuring the first step was to blend the road into the scenery.

The truck is store bought

I added an abandoned truck off a road fork and took the opportunity to weed up the scenery. [A friend of mine described her birthday dinner at a French restaurant as "Fat Forward". I've begun to think of scenery as "Weed Forward"].

Here come the weeds

I've always loved model railroading weeds. I think its because the Canadian suburbs are so orderly yet the scenery around train tracks is always the opposite.

My standard weed approach is base scenery first. Then random patches of grass followed by a few bushes.

I added black ballast around the switches since train crews would spend time there, restricting weed growth.

Look at that crisp track! Finally perfect ballast.

Placing weeds can be slow because of the layers approach and waiting for glue to dry after each step. But the crazy sounding thing is that I feel the slow pace helps one bond with said weed bed, thinking through the individual placement of grass, bushes, ground cover and other scenery. It sounds silly but it is true.

And with scenery added, the road did begin to look better. And I wasn't even done even though time had moved into March.

I'll close this post with a modified photo (a RS-18 switching a slab sided hopper) showing the subtle effect of the foreground grass:

Aw hell, here's a second one:

Here's a before from December 2021:

As June, Nowhere Road has reached 1/2 completion. The main part of the road is complete but I need to fill in the other side.

...And that is a long story. Next post will be a hodge-podge the begins the next part of the story.

A Touch of Stocking

The next phase of Nowhere Road's construction was the following series of text messages sent in late December (just before the lockdown):

Andrew: Hey there. Just confirming dinner tonight at 730.

Clare: Yes, we're confirmed. Looking forward to it.

Andrew: Umm, would you mind bringing an extra pair of stockings?

Clare: Either you're taking up bank robbing or have a burlesque career you've never told me about. But okay.

Andrew: Thanks.

Clare: So what do you need them for so I pick the right pair?

Andrew: Train scenery.

Clare: I should have known.

Nowhere Road looks like a melted chocolate bar here, not a road.

And this is where the dirt comes in. And the stocking.

Placed over a spray can cap, the stocking filtered my dirt into a lighter, less pebbly grade of dirt.

It is hard to tell from these photos, taken while the dirt was still glue saturated, but the stocking cap method did provide the desired fine layer of dirt.

And then I added some gravel to suggest that the road was maintained at some point.

I was pretty grouchy about the way the road looked at this stage. The gravel wasn't evenly applied. The cork base made the road stick out above the base scenery. And so on.

To lift my spirits I finished the scenery around the loading shed for Generic Canneries and left everything for another month.

Model railroading is one of the few times that seeing a (simulated) weed patch brings happiness. Yet another piece of base scenery covered.