As for the backdrop, one of the fellows in our train club, Bill S., had done an excellent clinic on backdrop painting. His technique is based on that of Chris Lyon whose videos can easily be found on YouTube.
Following the clinic, I constructed a flimsy mock-up of my backdrop out of Masonite, Bristol Board and 1x2 lumber. I didn’t want to be experimenting on the actual backdrop that I had spent so much time creating. Here is a picture of my mock-up, placed against my actual backdrop so it received the same lighting colour as found on the model railroad. I was quite happy with the overall result and felt confident that I could apply the same techniques when the time came to be doing the scenery for the railroad.
Since I had not finalized my plans for scenery, other than it would be based on the mountains of the Columbia Valley in British Columbia, Canada, I decided to only add clouds to my backdrop. I would leave hills, mountains and trees until later. Here are pictures of the result.
Next I set about track laying. As you can see from the pictures, I installed extruded foam insulation board on all surfaces. This is the same material that several members of our Free-mo modular group and I have used on our Free-mo modules with great success. The foam is easy to carve, glue and paint. I have not experienced any of the shrinking of the foam that some others have written about.
I laid a continuous loop of track with turnouts installed at appropriate locations.
This story ends here!
At about time I was laying track, our model railroad club was forced to leave its premises in the basement of a public school. It was very sad to take down a beautiful model railroad which was 95% complete thanks to the effort and skill of various club members over a 20-year period.
Following a period of introspection, we decided that our club’s main model railroad would be Free-mo. I have several blog posts which explain what Free-mo is about. I devoted a great deal of time to learning what I could about Free-mo and began constructing my first modules. The basement layout sat for almost two years with no further work being done. At last I had to admit to myself that I was no longer motivated to work on it.
In my next series of posts, I shall outline how I redeveloped the Wascana Canyon Railway without having to destroy much of what I had built.
