Monday, June 20, 2022

 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.