Quanah, Acme and Pacific (QA&P) - West Texas - Fictitious Model Railroad Layout Agriculture Industry

Added the final piece of bench work and started on the scenery. If only I learned important lessons early in the construction stage instead of at the end.

After spending money on construction foam, etc, I discovered that sawdust works great for forming hills. Not the sawdust from a sander, but the coarse stuff from a planer, table saw, etc. After forming the rough shape of the hill, I dribbled glue / water misture on it, let it dry overnight, and put plaster cloth right over the top of the sawdust. It worked great!!!

This long, narrow section has a passing siding that's about 9' long (780 scale feet). The siding comes together at the far end (newest portion of construction), and there's a 29" long section of track after the switch. I was going to make another liftout so that it would join the layout where the cotton gin is, but I'm about to talk myself into ending the layout here. By the way, the bumper track is temporary and just to keep from running something off onto the ground.

The 29" section would make a great place to disconnect the motive power, use the siding to run around the string of cars, and hook the locomotives on the other end and run the train back the direction it came from. Frankly, I almost never run trains anyway. The layout is an opportunity to model and display the locomotives and rolling stock in a location that looks better than shelves. Switching operations would be great on this. Someday, if I decide to continue the layout and build the other liftout, it could be added with no problem.

Anyway, that's where it stands at this point.

 

That end of track treatment in photo 2 looks just like something I did. EZ track lets you do monkey shirt stuff when needed.

My tail track was just about an inch short to allow an engine and one car. The projection is so short it doesn’t need anything under it, the plastic roadbed is plenty stiff enough. And the bumper section locks on like Fort Knox. The gurus at MR would be horrified.

 

Between the airplanes about to crash onto the layout and the precipitous drop at end-of-track, it's terrifying.

 

As my post said, the bumper track is just there temporarily to keep locomotives and rolling stock from falling off the layout. It will be replaced.

Paul

 

My overhanging bumper is permanent!

 

We have my wife to thank for that. She helps me with anything that is final scenery. I even have to ask her questions about painting structures, etc. Several of my bottles of Poly Scale paint are fairly old and the labels have faded to illegibility. She has to tell me what color they are.

 

Paul, you have a great wife to help you with your layout. Cynthia helps me with painting, trees and extra hands, we celebrated our 39th wedding anniversary on September 24th. Think I will keep her for awhile longer. Haha.

Enjoying your build thread.

Joe

 

You are correct, Joe: I am super blessed!!!! And congratulations on your 39th anniversary. We celebrated 33 in September. I didn't marry until I was 34 years old--too busy climbing mountains, racing bicycles, etc.

Joyce made the skirts that go around the base of the layout to hide what's stored underneath. She has contributed lots of time and brainpower to the railroad effort. A couple of the scenes, including the baseball diamond, were her ideas.

Paul Moore

 

My “permanent” overhang! Looks a lot scarier than it really is. It’s the tail of a runaround track and that last couple of inches adds a critical car to the tail track capacity. All it ever actually holds and only occasionally is a tender and there’s no sag at all. The EZ track roadbed is plenty stiff enough.

 

Haha, the help I get from the Dear Lady is not complaining about model railroading and the layout.

It could be a lot worse. We knew a guy whose wife complained that the layout room kept them from being “together,” ie sitting in the same room reading/knitting.

 

About 20 years ago a friend decided to get out of HO and he sold me his partially built buildings. A couple are in my downtown scene, and the rest became kit bashing projects. One was this weird mill looking two story thing that I never figured out how to use. The top was cannibalized / kitbashed and became a completely different building. The bottom just sat in a drawer, forgotten, until a week ago.

It's still a weird structure, but at least it looks like a stand-alone building. It will be built into a hill on the edge of the layout. The roof is still primer because I haven't decided whether to make it a tarpaper roof or rusty corrugated metal. Any ideas as to what this could be?

Paul Moore

 

Or you could plant some dense shrubbery all around the bare parts of the walls.

 

Not much progress on the strange building in the previous post, but another project is coming together. Many of you commented on the actual building in this scene, because it is a rendition of an old European kit (Heljan, maybe). It is going to be a gypsum plant, and requires quite a bit of artistic license. Gypsum is prevalent in this area. That is what the Acme is in QA&P--a large gypsum / drywall plant.

The pipes and large dust collector came from a Walther's kit. It was highly modified. Have any of you actually found any Walther's kits that had decent detail without the large, crude pieces and detail parts? This one required hours of filing, cutting, and replacing of ladders, etc. The details in the as-delivered kit were ridiculously crude. Looking at the photos, I should have done more filing.

The legs that support the pipes were simple scratch built items using plastruct (think it was plastruct) I beams and angle iron. Still need to fabricate the little footers under each vertical leg, and for now just have a piece of wood holding the legs in place. The plastic / concrete base under the dust collector will be ditched. It's not glued on, so it can be easily removed. After looking at the photos, it looks pretty bad.

The pipes and dust collector will get more weathering, and there will be dirt and dust under the collector.

Paul Moore

 

Remember these? Look at the windows. Remove mullions and skinny up the ones you keep.

 

Haven't posted on the layout in awhile. We've been busy with pecan harvest, but that's finally done.

Built the liftout on the southeast corner of the layout, so there aren't bumper tracks hanging out in space anymore. Planted a few more trees, added quite a bit of foliage, etc., and planted my wife's pecan orchard. Her initials are JM, so we named it J Bar M Pecans. There will be a backdrop behind most of the layout, including the orchard, so it will give it more depth than one row of pecan trees. The orchard's kind of toy looking, but maybe I can find some more realistic trees.

Paul Moore

 

Looks great! I like the lift out bridge

 

About the trees, I read somewhere once that you can add some slightly lighter flocking to these trees to add highlights and provide an appearance of bright sunlight shining down. And tree trunks are grey, not brown. You can paint them grey and dry brush brown streaks.

Look into super-trees also.

The open space on this layout is wonderful. The kind of country I want to live in.

 

Thanks, Ethan. It's nice being able to run trains all the way around. And the liftout worked out great.

 

The lighting doesn't really show the color of the trunks. They're actually a gray-brown color, but the photo doesn't look it. And they're plastic trunks. They were free (a friend tore down his layout and gave me his trees) so I'll use them for now. But they definitely need work or replacement! The layout is fairly typical of where we live. A mixture of flat ground, hills, pastures, farm fields and trees. And not many people!!!