It's been a while

It's been a busy summer, lots of farm work to do, and not much time for working on the railroad. I did make some time to play around with backdrop photos and card stock buildings to use at the yard. I have been using textures from Clever Models, CG Textures and Model Builder to make some building flats.

Some of the buildings are just card stock, other are glued to foam core, but my favorite material is the matte board that is used in picture framing. I need more practice, but I am pretty happy with the result so far. I have had better luck using Modge Podge over spray adhesive to glue the card stock to the background material. With Modge Podge I can get better adhesion across the entire board, and it's easier to apply to multi-sided buildings. Now I just need to get better at making the boxes to glue the card stock to. After reading the article on using actual photos by Lance Mindheim in MRH I want to try that technique as well, and there are a couple industries in Worcester that look like they might be a good subject to model. I smell a rail fanning trip coming up.

I have also been cleaning up my track work in the yard. A bunch of turnouts needed debugging, proving that I can screw up pretty much anything, including turnouts made with Fast Tracks jigs. The good thing is that I have been able to fix all of them.

I even found the problem in this one,

now all I need to do is take it out and fix it!

To test the track in the yard I have been making up switch lists and having mini op sessions just in the yard. There 3 industries, and an interchange track with another railroad, so I find it pretty easy to spend over an hour just running trains in this section of the layout. Of course some of that time is spent trying to  understand why a certain car derails on one turnout, but not the others.