The Ogdensburg & Norwood
cure, and waterproof footprint when they get glued into the layout with the Henry 237 Acoustical Ceiling Tile Ad- hesive. The few other turnouts for code 83 and code 100 track are commercial Atlas or Walthers turnouts, and B&K kits.
The backdrop is made up of sheets of surplus vinyl flooring glued with the finished side down to the lauan ply- wood using commercial flooring adhe- sive. On the exposed “rough” side of the flooring, we painted two coats of white primer and then two coats of flat blue for the sky. I don’t do “clouds” because, no matter how well done, a painted two-dimensional cloud does not look realistic except when looking at it straight on. With the linear viewing distances on this layout, the illusion would be lost by looking at that distor- tion. Bill Brown’s LARC Products line of superior scenic backdrops are just great in filling out our views! The scenery is mostly supported by foam, covered by Structo-lite®
soaked
sections of paper towel. Structo-lite is a U.S. Gypsum product that is a perlite- aggregate gypsum plaster, used in the industry as a base coat in plaster ap- plication. It is extremely lightweight, dries to a natural color, and has a tex- ture that begs to be used in our model scenery applications. For finely-detailed rock castings, I use molding plaster in commercial and
home-made rubber molds, coloring
them after they are in place using acrylic paints and washes. Modeling the Adirondack Mountains of New York in July requires foliage, and lots of it. In fact, because of the amount of foliage economical alterna- tives had to be developed. First, I make my own ground foam by using common kitchen blenders and artist’s fine oil paint. This making of ground foam has been a live clinic that I’ve presented at several conventions over the years. Hundreds of deciduous trees on the
layout were made from completely dried goldenrod heads–another live clinic. I harvest them in bunches after the first hard frost of autumn but before the first heavy snow breaks their fine branch structures. These bundles are stored in the barn for a year until they’re com- pletely dried out. Then, doing dozens at a time, I trim the heads so that the branches extend only about an inch from the stalk. Next, I stretch out fiber fill, drape it over the branches, and spray paint them flat black. This adds shadow to the interior of the tree, acts as an ad- hesive for the fiber fill, and gives some added strength to the it as well. The final step is to spray adhesive or cheap hair spray on the units, sprinkle on the ground foam, and go planting. Jim Hoopes and Eric Smith help out with trees making and general scenery. The conifers take a little longer. They
are also homemade on a modification of an RMC article some years ago using a wood-product based air-conditioner/fur- nace filter material for branches, loaded onto bamboo skewers that I whittled to length and shape. Working quickly and outside for ventilation, I first spray paint the entire tree a flat gray from the side for the bark color, and then immediately spray kelly green from the top just be- fore sprinkling on fine Woodland Scenics ground foam. The final step is to spray flat black on the bottom side of the tree for shading, wait until it dries and plant. The foreground trees are mostly Sce- nic Express products. I also extensively use fibre fill sprayed black and covered with ground foam, as well as blender- ground goldenrod waste, for the base underbrush that is common in the mountains. We mix and match structures on the They are either completely kitbashed, or follow-the-
O&N. scratchbuilt,
plans-to-the-letter, with some TT scale buildings added for forced perspective. For a few examples,
Charlie Albee
helped by changing the King Mill Enter- prises building flats used in Ogdensburg by replacing the printed windows with dimensionally-matched Tichy Train win- dows so we could light them up with in- terior white LED’s. He also heavily mod- ified the Walthers marine terminal in Ogdensburg to double its size and serve as a scenic divider hiding the “car ferry.” Bill Brown, Bob Verkuyl, and I have
scratchbuilt, respectively, the stations at Tupper Lake, Lake Pleasant and Long Lake from highly detailed plans by the late Don Andrews, which in- clude full interior possibilities. Brian Curry showed ingenuity by using a small wooden picture frame to repli- cate the contours of a mansard roof for the Potsdam union station. Many of the structures also contain interior lighting, divided by rooms for better ef- fect. We use small brass rods extending from the base of the structures that slide into matching brass tubes perma- nently mounted in the scenery for elec- trical lighting contact and consistent placement when removed for cleaning or repair. Lately, I’ve taken to final scenery de-
The Hannawa steel trestle (above) is patterned after the Ferndale trestle where Jim Heidt’s great grandfather was the station agent. He kitbashed the structure using Micro-Engineering kit’s. O&N No. 2784 (page 53, top) leads its train north out of the Long Lake tunnel. The train passes the combination station/hotel which was scratchbuilt by the author. The early morn- ing lights of Ogdensburg reveal a 4-8-2 pulling cars off the St. Lawrence car ferry (right).
52
tailing, including flanger signs, whistle posts, and tell tales. But my favorites are lineside poles which I scratchbuild from wooden cotton swabs sticks, scale 4″×4″ stripwood cross arms, fine wire “nubs” painted acrylic green for insula- tors, and “wired” with E-Z Line (from Berkshire Junction) and very lightly glued with cyanoacrylate. At first, I started placing them 30 to 40 scale feet apart instead of the AT&T standard of 100 feet because I initially thought it would help develop the illusion of dis-
JULY 2013
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