Wascana Canyon Railway v3 – Part 3
Backdrops
- As stated earlier, even after being reasonably happy with my mock-up backdrop to test my artistry I was concerned that I would never be completely satisfied with my own painting skills. I have seen too many beautiful model railroads with crude “puff ball white” clouds unnaturally hanging bizarrely in a too-blue sky.
- After doing a lot of on-line research of suppliers of model railroad backdrops I settled on what turned out to be a fantastic product. I ordered my backdrops from Trainjunkies. This Utah, US company has a nice variety of scenes and skies to choose from. What attracted me was the ability to choose one or more image and have then expertly blended to create a seamless backdrop of up to 100 feet in length.
- For my top level I chose the Sierra Mountain Divide which is passable for the background mountains and lakes of the Columbia Valley. Since I wanted 35 feet of continuous image, they simply stitched together the inverse of the image to the original image. Unless it is pointed out to a guest not one person has ever noticed the fact that I have the same scene appearing almost three times across this backdrop. The effect is very good.
- For my middle level I chose the grassy hill image but in N-scale as I wanted the hills to be less dominant in the background. Since I had only about one foot of backdrop height to deal with, whichever one I chose would need to be trimmed to fit anyway.
- For the lower yard level I chose the Union Pacific Yards image. The only challenge I had with this image was that a Union Pacific yard naturally is filled with UP yellow locomotives but most of my rolling stock is CP which is decidedly not yellow. However, since I ordered the backdrop printed on HP matte photo paper, I decided I could carefully use artist pencils to colour over several of the locomotives. It was not necessary for me to do this to all of the locomotives because, as luck would have it, it is not uncommon to see UP locomotives operating beside CP locomotives I assume because of some sort of reciprocal business arrangement between the two railroads. This backdrop was also ordered in N-scale because I wanted the image to be very much in the background and to not dominate the scenery and to create “forced perspective”. I am tremendously pleased with the result. Not one single person has questioned the colours of the locomotives in the backdrop yard, either the UP colours or the red colours.
- The one challenge with installing such long continuous backdrops is that it would be almost impossible to do so by yourself. The use of repositionable spray adhesive is recommended by the backdrop supplier and I agree that this is the best way to go. I enlisted the help of two friends from our model railroad club, Doug and Ron. Ron, who is much taller than both Doug and me held the rolled-up backdrop, I applied the spray adhesive to the back of the backdrop and Doug gently unrolled the backdrop and positioned it on the prepared backdrop surface. This process had to be smooth but quick. Then, using clean rubber gloves I slid the background around slightly so it was positioned to my satisfaction – I did the latter step because in the even of an overly aggressive move it would be possible to wrinkle or tear the stiff paper which the backdrop is made from. I didn’t want to put either Doug or Ron in the position of possibly ruining the job. All went well and I am delighted with the result.
- As you can see from the above picture there remained in some places a noticeable seam between the top of the backdrop. Since I had colour matched the darkest blue of the pre-painted surface to the backdrop sky colour itself this was only the case in a few places. Using this dark blue colour mixed with varying amounts of white acrylic paint I was able to do a decent enough job of airbrushing selected places along the top of the backdrop to blend with the image itself. I am very satisfied with the result - and many times more satisfied than I would ever have been with a hand-painted backdrop.
