Great Northwestern Railway

Roads - they connect the model railroad to a piece of the world we are all familiar with. As such, having roads on a model RR is an important scenic element. That said, I find roads to be tedious. Too often I see them dropped in without context, looking like they are anything but pavement, or flat out cheesy looking. So I have been holding off making roads... until now.  Turay sits on top of the helix. I wanted to use the space to tie in Armstrong and give the feel of a local center of population, without making it look like a big city. Think Las Vegas, New Mexico. So the city would have several key structures (more on that later), tied in with, you guessed it, roads. The basis for the roads are sheet styrene. My daughter works retail, so she was able to score for me some relatively heavy signs they were throwing away. Yay! Unfortunately the backs had some kind of adhesive on them that made the 'clean' side unusable. The printed side had pricing info on it... oh well. Next step...

Excited to report that a LOT of work has been done on Mesa City.  The area around the wye has been scenerized.  Got Orchard Supply yard finished up, added the buildings, and put up some fence.  The fence was a bit tedious, but sure makes it look better. Pavement is 0.100 styrene spray painted a dark gray.  The styrene was cut up to the ties.  The pavement between the styrene and track is unsanded grout.  Came out pretty nice! Test driving some of the rail cars. Once the pavement was down, started adding scenery.  The 'dirt' is sifted play sand.  The ballast is sifted "gray breeze" from the landscape materials lot. With that in progress, I blended in the new work with the old. Use a LOT of different textures and materials to get the siding tracks to look like they have not seen much maintenance over the years.  Added fencing as well. To break up the massive pavement area, I put a strip of "dirt" with styrene curbs delineating the space between...

Yes, it's been quiet on the blog, but work certainly has been happening!  Of note, the C-19 bug allowed for more evenings and weekends at home to tackle a massive project.  Let me explain... The layout is double decked, without a helix to get between the decks.  Well, actually, it is TRIPLE decked at the staging yard, so there IS a helix to get to that from one end.  But there are no helixes between the visible decks.  This was done to allow the operators to really follow their trains from point to point.  But even with a "no-lix" connection, it also means there has to be a transition from where the connection between the lower deck and the upper deck... which means the scenery for some of that run will have to be associated with the lower deck, and then later with the upper deck.  That makes for an interesting scenic transition. The way this is being handled on the GNW is having the lower deck include the first portion of the ramp up in the scenery wi...