Scenic experiment #1

[Taka]

Hello all!

I bought a WS mountain diorama kit to get the feel for doing scenery on a small controlled area. It was my first go around with the process and I had quite a lot of fun making it.

I bought extra rock molds to produce enough rocks for my desired look. Its about four hours or so of work to create my little mountain scene, which is now doubling as a display for my Athearn Genesis sd60. I live on the eastern shore of Md and decided to go with A Norfolk Southern loco. I drive by Harrington DE which is has a NS office and lots of Locos for to be had for rail fanning pics. )

I plan to use the mountain theme for my big layout, which i will undertake this spring. Since NS does go up through PA it will be sort of accurate to an extent. But i plan on doing a tall viaduct bridge over a nice chasm.. and maybe even have the train make a stop by the ocean.. ha.. who knows thats part of the fun for me at least. Hopefully my trains will be able to run through what I create.....

Let me know if the links don't work, I can load them to a different location.

 

[Taka]

I made my rock castings with Plaster of Paris, which came in a 25lb bag for 15 bucks. I think the WS hydrocal is that much for 1 pound. I did some comparative castings with POP and HC and the HC was fairly brittle. Its definitely a harder compound, but considering Im not going for any type of structural integrity the softer POP is fine and way cheaper, also easy to carve or reshape.

I did find a place on the net that sells Hydrocal and several other variteties in bulk, (50#) buckets for like 19 to 26 bucks depending on which variety you chose. But the shipping was insane, like 68 bucks or so to a resi address. I checked for a commerical addy and it was half the amount.

I attached the rocks to the hardshell with latex caulk, it worked pretty good, but I noticed that if it got on the surface the washes would not hold. The directions called for placement and color washing the rock faces before painting the hard shell to and earth tone. I think this is backwards, Id rather paint the hardshell then add my rockfaces, so I dont cover my rockwork with brown and i wont get any white bleed through in the rock cracks. Which as I look at my diorama after the flash of my cam lit it up shows the white hardshell between some of the rocks.

 

[Taka]

So what is the deal with this forum? No comments at all? Is it because Im new here or something? I see numerous threads being looked at but hardly anyone comments/posts.

Ill go look on facebook for some model rr peeps, Im wasting my time here. Which is sad, this seemed like a decent forum.

 

[ekuth]

The main problem, Taka is that last June the forum switched hands to new owners... who appointed an admin who really didn't know beans about the hobby and went nuts instituting crazy rules and banning people left and right.

There was a mass exodus away from all of the various forums to other sites. Fast forward to October. I assumed the admin spot and reversed the changes that drove folks away. Sadly, it was too late for many and the site is only now starting to come back to life...

Most of all of the die hard members of the RR forums have since moved on.