168 - Tracks, But Not Tank Ones - Part 3

Thanks for dropping by again. If this is your first look at this project, here is part 1 and part 2. There are quite a few pictures in this post, but hopefully they are a bit more interesting than part 2. Read on....

With the track all laid out nicely, we took most of it off again! Sounds stupid, but hear me out. First of all we marked around the track using a pencil to give us a good idea where the track would go back on and secondly we left the holding pins in place again to allow us to put the track back in the same position.

We had marked out the track location as we were going to spray a black basecoat where the track was with green, grey and brown spray around it depending on the zone of the layout. Ballast, flock and decorative touches would then be added afterwards.

This is the curve near the swing out section. The black, green and grey have all been sprayed on and the ballast added. The ballast was put down a little bit too heavily so the black doesn't really show through.

Here is the same corner with a little less green and without the ballast. You can see how rough the spray painting was. Some cardboard strips were used to try and get an even width of black and then other bits of cardboard were used to stop the green from being sprayed over the black. The grey section will be the town with station and siding.

This is the transition point from the urban area to the marshalling yard. The brown and grey will be blended in and some scenery added to cover the join. You can see where there will be points between tracks as well.

Here is part of the vast expanse of the marshalling yard.

And a bit more of the marshalling yard. We didn't mark out the track here as it may be a marshalling yard or it may have a turntable added, but that's something for us to conquer at a later date.

Here the marshalling yard comes round into the more countryside section. The back area hasn't been sprayed as there will be a raised track which we need to sort before doing too much work.

This is the same countryside station section but with a bit too much ballast. We bought quite a bit of ballast, so were very liberal with it's application. 

At the end of the rural station there will be a road and crossing leading off in to the window.

The final curve before the opening. We used a mix of Halfords and left over GW sprays for the colours. The brown was a very fetching Rover colour. We also started something a little more special in this corner....

We made a bridge! But more importantly we've started making a tunnel within a hill! The hill is made out of some celotex insulation foam. The tunnel was marked out using the curved track and then cut out using a combination of jigsaw blades, razor saw and modelling knife. It's still needing a bit of tidying up before it's at the right height. The curve rises through the tunnel in order to make it the right height for the bridge. The track will just come out of the side of the hill, but we might grade the face back a little make it look less sheer.

Here is a shot looking down on the tunnel with the track in it's rough position. We have rolled the longest carriage my dad own's through and it doesn't foul on any of the tunnel sides which is good. There was a lot of fun measuring done before we started cutting out and it was definitely a case of measure again and again before cutting.

Of course the track needs to be able to get up to the tunnel. So we made some hills. This was out of a thinner celotex insulation sheet. The grading on the hills were made by using a razor saw and gently scraping the material away.

As you can see we made quite a bit of progress this time around.

Thank you for reading, stay tuned for another update and #prayforparis