More Scenery Progress

The tobacco barn kit I started work on in my last post has turned out to be more intricate than I had previously thought, but I've made good progress on it. While the detail level, and the effort needed to complete it, is fairly high, it turns out that since this will be in a foreground area, the extra work will be worth it. I finished adding the mortar to the brick foundation and fire pit, but I sill need to add the door, lean-to roof, and roofing.

The last photo gives an idea of the context for the whole scene. It's going to need a lot more trees and shrubbery, but the basic ground form is now complete. I have a number of CSX, Western Maryland, and Norfolk and Western videos I can use for inspiration to finish the scenery.

Scenery Work

I mounted the kitbashed grouop of low-relief buildings from my last post at their final location, covering up an HVAC duct behind Egg Cabin in West Egg:

This gives me a whole new photo angle for taking pictures of equipment. Below is a Walthers Mainline New Haven GP9:

Then I moved to the Appalachian scenery on the other side of the room. I had removed most of the fascia from the layout in this area when I replaced the DC wiring with a 14 AWG DCC bus. It took me a while to put the fascia back in place, but now that I have, I've gone back to finishing some scenery work.

I decided to add a Rail Scale Models tobacco drying shed to a hillside I'd roughed out with plaster cloth. I built up an area to mount it with a piece of foamcoare, leveled out with bits of scrap foamcore and white foam. I used a circular level designed for turntables or cameras to be sure the surface was level in all directions:

I ordered a 3-pound bag of Sculptamold off eBay and mixed up a batch with cheap raw umber acrylic to build up a basic ground surface around it:

You can see the basic tobacco shed assembly in place.

I extended the Sculptamold ground cover to the rest of the scenic area on this hillside and will begin more extensive scenery work around the tunnel portal.

Finishing A Building Flat Kitbash

I ordered several more Trackside Flats building fronts, which I finished off with roarward extensions from foamcore that made them low-relief buildings rather than just flats:

The tallest one was already warping when it arrived, which shows how useful it is to add the extensions. I had had a Bar Mills mioltiple-panel billboard kicking around for some years, but I was never sure what to do with it. But this past week, I found this photo on Facebook:

A lightbulb switched on in my head -- I realized I had a King Mill low-relief building that in itself wasn't very interesting -- it was a row of back-alley buildings with boarded up windows, to which I had added roof materials. But it was a perfect surface to take my Bar Mills billboards:

At that point, a more complete plan began to come together. I built a stepped base from foamcore and sprayed it with Scalecoat Grime from a rattle can

I put the King Mill-Bar Mills kitbash on the lower level and backed it up with two Trackside Flats buildings on the upper level, plus one I'd scratchbuilt from a flat I'd downloaded from Facebook:

Here is the rear view:

And here we see the total width, 3-1/2 inches:

I'll mount it on the layout when the glue is completely dry.

Kitbashing Building Flats

I was a big fan of Kingmill Flats before it left the business (I've seen references that he sold the masters to Scenic Express, but they've never come back). I've glued some straight to the layout backdrop, but I fairly quickly realized you can turn them into stand-alone low-relief modules that can be reused and rearranged. For instance, here's a Kingmill flat that I converted to a module with foamcore backing:

Following George Sellios's inspiration, I add roofing and things like vents from Bar Mills, Rusty Rail, etc. One thng I discovered was that in any case, if you just mount the paper flat on a sheet of foamcore alone, the combination will warp. So the extension to the rear adds bracing and strength that keeps the image on the front from warping.

After Kingmill left the business, I found that flats from a vendor called Trackside Flats or an eBay store called Anglie's Trackside Flats are a very similar product. Unlike thre Kingmill flats, they come already mounted on a sheet of foamcore:

This is a good start, but again, just the paper mounted on foamcore will warp over the coming months. So I add a structure behind it made of foamcore. The structure includes an interior horizontal brace that adds rigidity to the front.

I glue the final assembly together with Elmer's glue and hold it in place with a rubber band. Wax paper protects the surface from any runs of glue.

I add roofing to the finished product with textures I find on the web, download, and print:

I've had my Kingmill based modules for five years and more, and none has warped.

I make all my low-relieff flats to a standard depth of 2-3/4 inches. They'll stand up straight, and they can be lined up in any order:

In fact, with this technique, you can build low-relief flats using textures from the web or photos from ghost sign sites. The Joe's Pizza was a flat I found in a Facebook post.

I found the picture below of the Fillmore area on the F&SM on Facebook.

If you look at the background, you can see that Sellios lines up layers of low-relief buildings to give a 3-D impression on his backdrop. Some of those in the photo may be similar paper building flats, but some are commercial plastc models, and others are ones he built himself.

I'm aiming to get a similar scene on my layout using paper low-relief models, including those I've shown here.