Building the town of White Haven is a pretty complicated project - I wanted to capture the flavor of the place without resorting to exact prototyping. On the northwest side of town there's a fairly steep slope where Chestnut Street heads north and parallels the Lehigh Valley tracks. The road goes up and then comes back to near track level in about a half mile. Where this hill meets the railroad tracks there is a large stone-faced retaining wall. I didn't get over there to take a good closeup, but I'm not going to delay things to get a better idea of the composition of this wall. You can see it in the distance of the photo below on the left-hand side of the tracks (there's a blowup of the photo below this one).
In terms of approximate scale, if you surmise that the light cabinet is probably 5 feet high, the wall is about 12-15 feet high. There are houses up there above the tracks, allowing me to extend the residential area of town a bit more than I have already and generating some different areas of interest. There's also a small auto repair/inspection station right before the wall. So, rather than another parallel street of homes (like Berwick Street), I'm going to incorporate the retaining wall, the auto repair shop (my plan is to build that out of paper cardstock using a downloadable Clever Models file) and the homes up on the hill before I come back to track level where I hope to incorporate the Lehigh Valley Engine Shop.
So, I altered my northern section of town and imported more 1/2" foam slabs to simulate the slopes and support the structures up there. Originally, I had almost 4" of difference between the lowest track level and the top of the hill which obscured too much of the depth available to add houses, and I found that if I just took off the top layer of foam, it looked much better. I then profiled the edge of the foam slabs with my foam cutter to allow for track clearance and give the wall a slope like that in the photograph (closer to the tracks at the bottom, further away at the top.
Now, the 1/2" low density foam product (the white stuff) I used is not too good for simulating block walls. The foam particles tend to be "beady" and if you try to simulate wall joints, the joints aren't crisp and featured. You also have to address the layered effect of the foam slabs where they meet which would have meant adding some sort of plaster, drywall compound or Sculptamold and then scoring that to make it look like rock walls. What I needed was a high density foam product that I could easily etch - I'd done that pretty well with my tunnel portals I'd made out of 1" high-density foam board (the pink stuff), but I wanted the wall to have some flex to it. I ended up taking a 3" by 24" piece of pink foam and running it through my table saw to rip it down to 3/8"-thick. It bends and the joints can be created with a ball-point pen.
I decided to have a random-laid wall (stones of various sizes in no particular pattern). I didn't try to think too much and after about an hour with the pen while I listened to the Penn State/Arizona State hockey game, I had my pink wall. I sculpted the layers of white foam a bit, added some foam adhesive and stuck the wall with some straight pins to hold it in place while the glue dried.
If you look carefully at the prototype photo, the wall also continues on a 90-degree angle away from the tracks (I'll assume at each end). So, I'll have to build end-walls that tie into the emplaced long wall. I cut those out from what remained of my 3/8" styrofoam stock, took a ballpoint pen to that and cut them to fit each space on each end.
The wall is also going to have to be tailored to the slope of the hill (from the center of town we go up the hill and then back down to nearly track level. Therefore, when the glue dried I sketched a line on the front of the wall in keeping with the projected hill slopes and used my foam cutter to get a rough profile and then finished it with a piece of sandpaper.
My wife loves pink, but you don't find pink walls too often. I wanted a dark, dingy, moss encrusted wall, and it would be TEMPTING to get the can of black spray paint and get an initial black on the wall quickly. DON'T DO IT! Styrofoam gets eaten by spray paint if you're too aggressive. The pores of the foam react with the propellant in spray paint and your crisp etched indentations become gaping chasms that still reveal pink deep underneath. Believe me, I've learned that the hard way. Better to get some acrylic black (or dark gray) paint and a brush and take some time to prime the piece. You might get away with using spray paint after that, but I don't think it's worth the risk - stick with brush-laid acrylics for the final finish. So, here it is in gray and black - more aging and moss-adding to do with the brush, but I can't get it done tonight. This was a good weekend project when I had a bunch of stuff going on. I could do a little bit each day and see progress. I'm also looking forward to adding trees and shrubs that grow over the wall like we see in the prototype picture, but that won't happen for a while - lots of other scenery to get to before detailing this area.
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