I started talking about building the town of White Haven from the track into the background hills in my "Current Projects" page. I thought I'd talk about my current progress on that particular project and talk about some of the techniques I'm using.
First things first.... White Haven's an old town at the top of the Lehigh Valley Gorge. The town was incorporated in 1843, although its first settlers arrived about 20 years before that. The big draw was originally because of the Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company - the town became a major storage and loading area for coal boats floated down the canal to the Bethlehem. After the demise of the canal, railroads took over the movement of coal and products between New Jersey and the major coal fields near Scranton and Wilkes Barre. The Jersey Central was a major player in town, having a small yard and maintenance facilities there. The Lehigh Valley Railroad also passed through on the western side of the Lehigh River. The Jersey Central abandoned their trackage in the late 1960's and early 1970's, and upon the formation of Conrail, the Lehigh Valley mainline became the only active line through White Haven. On western side of the tracks were most of the residences in town, with stores and industries between the tracks and the river.
Here's a satellite overview from Google Maps
At the bottom of the picture you can see the railway bridge over the Lehigh and the railway running through the town. The Conrail line runs parallel with Towanda Street with an at-grade crossing at Berwick Street (PA 940). Between 437 and the railway is the residential section of town, and that section's built on a fairly steep hill. It's not as steep as the gorge, but it's not ideal for developing building lots. I've included a shot looking up Berwick Street.
Note the stone walls, small quaint houses, some Victorian elements, the church, a good number of trees. These elements are the ones I want to have in my version of White Haven. But here's the big problem - I have about 18 inches of depth to accomplish that. The residential portion of the town is about 3 blocks deep. I'm going to do a lot of compression and try to model maybe 2 blocks at most, with a good deal of the background made to make you believe there's more back there.
The other space issue is length. Total amount of space I have for the town is about 6 feet. Again, smoke, mirrors, and imagination to trick the viewer into thinking there's more.
So, going back to my Current Projects page, I talked about the importance of getting building foundations level. Un-level just looks wrong. Which brings me to a pet peeve. I visited Northlandz one Saturday back around 2000 with my kids and my dad. For those who don't know, Northlandz boasts that it is the world's largest model railroad. It's one man's vision and one man's work, and if you're looking for an inspiring video, it's at https://vimeo.com/166403522, and it's called "Some Kind of Quest". I don't have trouble with the enormity of it - it'll take you more than an hour at a good walking pace to make your way around it, but the one takeaway I had after visiting it (and maybe they've fixed this in the 20 years since I've been there), there was a lot of hilly scenery and buildings placed in it on stilts. And I'm not talking tree houses or very small cottages. I'm talking masonry buildings and large substantial industrial buildings. It looks FAKE! I don't like fake. One of my goals for White Haven is to have level areas to place my buildings. Once I have them located, I locate the road grades and road locations and then contour each building lot. One more criticism of Northlandz - too many short trains. I'd rather see fewer trains that are running realistically - they have enough track to do something awesome, but I get the feeling that it wasn't a priority for the builder. After visiting there, I think I said to my Dad "Impressive but wrong..."
But, as I said, levelness is important. I laid a piece of 1/4" plywood down where the town would be located and proceeded to see how much room was available for building lots. The picture below shows that experiment....
As you can see, the space available allows for about three buildings deep before I run into the backdrop, and that's before I allow for space to separate lots, and that space is even more challenging when we add the progressive slope.
My next planning device was to break the depth into thirds (18" divided by 3 is 6", so I cut a bunch of different thickness foam boards into 6" slabs about 2 feet in length). I began laying out these slabs in progressive stacks from front to back and then placing buildings appropriately. The photo below shows one of those versions.
As you may be able to see in the photo, I'm using 1/4" foam board, 1/2 inch, 1" and 1.5" styrofoam here, and this would be looking up Berwick Street. which is not too far off the picture I showed looking up toward the real church.
Then I got stuck. It's great to have flat building lots, but how do I get roadways built? How do I get up the hill and build a realistic looking roadway? I started to look at some products for road building. Woodland Scenics had just what I wanted (a Road System Learning Kit (https://woodlandscenics.woodlandscenics.com/show/item/lk952) along with some good videos (on the same webpage) on how to put it down. The key takeaway from the videos is that I have to have a nice semi-flat surface (plaster cloth with a layer of sanded sculptamold should work fine). How to get there become the next hurdle. I started thinking about building inclined planes out of styrofoam. The saws I had on hand would be tough to work with, and I'd heard about hot-wire foam cutters. Bought one on ebay for $18 and it works quite nicely. Probably with some more practice I can get better. Anyway, here's Berwick Street now with the inclined planes between the layers of foam.
So, I was rolling. I laid out the lots for the first two buildings on the area adjacent to the track (the yellow Victorian and the blue two-story). I also established Towanda Street running right behind these two lots (only one lane, instead of two, but depth is at a premium... The next thing to tackle was the empty lot just to the left of that pink incline. In real life, there is a two-story pink house there today with some Victorian accents. I decided that I needed to break into my Christmas presents from my wife, one of which was a DPM Our House kit (https://woodlandscenics.woodlandscenics.com/show/item/12700) which I'd been wanting for quite a while but hadn't bought. That became this weekend's project. I had some neon pink acrylic paint, had some reservations, but the end result is really striking...
As you can see, it's going to take some creative terraforming to fit that into the layout, but it's really an awesome kit. Really nice details, easy to build, fun to paint. I have a couple other new kits from Christmas that I'll also try to add soon. You get the basic idea, I think. I'm trying to work structures in and make them believable. Once I get everything laid out, it'll be time to cement all of the foam down and lay down a layer of plaster cloth and sculptamold. Then I'll be able to layout and finish my roadways, add grass, shrubs and trees. Cool stuff.
July Update: It's gotten quite hot outside - no longer a pleasure to be outside working on the estate, so it's time to get back to the railroad, which includes the town of White Haven. When I last wrote I'd just purchased a foam cutter, and had laid out a preliminary location for a lot of the available buildings to place in the background of White Haven. Then I started to have second thoughts. Couldn't I build the entire town support structure out of foam board? Make all of my terrain with foam and then paint and add scenic texture? So, I started to experiment, trying to integrate from the pre-constructed I-80 exit ramp to the town. I added layer upon layer of foam board, cutting some small pieces and fitting them like a puzzle. And I started to think about painting all of that and working with all of the joints between the foam board and nixed that whole idea.
Here's the plan - go back to the original thoughts. I'm going to rough in each piece of foam board, anchor them down and together, and then place plaster cloth over everything to create the backing for Sculptamold. Then I balked when I started to think about the area immediately beneath each house - that has to be absolutely flat to install the structures. So, I'm going to mark each house location carefully on the foam board, layout the plaster cloth and smear plaster on top of those locations and then sand each area flat.
I'm also going to creating pretty abrupt transitions from front to back of the area. There are going to be a lot of retaining walls, fences, shrubbery hedges, etc between property lines. Hope that works....
I took a couple pictures of the south side of the area where I've begun to rough in the foam board. A lot of the rough-in was just done with the foam cutter, with the idea of a gradual reduction in slope from south to north.
I did think about including the Little League baseball park just south of the exit ramps, but I didn't have enough room. All of the exit ramps and roadways in the background are going to be massively compressed from front to back - it's illusions of roadways I'm going to go after. You can also see where I've "Sharpied" in the building locations. Goal for this weekend is to get all of the White Haven background foam board roughed in and glued down. Next week I hope to start laying plaster cloth. Sculpamold comes after that followed by background painting, road construction and then a LOT of detailing. These areas are going to likely take months to finish, but I'm optimistic that when I'm done, that that area will be something to be proud of.
November Update (November????): Yeah, you read that right. Spent the month of October in Texas and there was a lot of work to do to get my property ready for fall, so the work on White Haven had to take a back seat again. I thought I'd be able to quickly glue and stick styrofoam together, but found that the glue worked much better under pressure (my belt sander was weighty and compact enough to provide the pressure), but gluing the styrofoam together is a nightly process on a small area each night. I'm now nearly complete gluing it all together and can start thinking about adding the layers of plaster cloth and Sculptamold. I used two products for gluing - I liked "Stryoglue" by MakeitFun, but couldn't find a local supplier. Joann Fabrics had something called "Clearstick Foam Glue" which seems a bit more toxic but really sticks well after being held down overnight. I'm probably going to lay plaster cloth right up to the marked areas for my buildings and leave the bare foam board for the actual building locations to ensure they stay nice and flat. Once I get that finished it will be time for more photos I think.
A month has passed and while glue dried I decided to work on some other areas around White Haven (see my blog entires on the CNJ overpass, the town backdrop and the Tall Retaining Wall). The retaining wall influenced me into altering the whole north end of town, so I moved some things around a bit. Once I was happy with placements, I shaved down my roadways and identified where a lot of walls are going to go up around town, made sure all of the foam was glued down before I started laying out the plaster cloth on all of the contours. Here are a couple pictures of the south end of town and the I-80 interchange...
So, you say, what happens after you lay out all of the plaster cloth? It's then time to lay on the Sculptamold on top of the cloth, paint it and start landscaping all of the building lots and roads as well as the aforementioned I-80 interchange with PA Rt. 940. I detailed that in specifics in another blog entry.
It is now January 2021 and after finishing up I-80, it's now time to get back to the town. I started laying out some roadways in town and ran into a snag with space and decided to add a smaller house on the corner of Berwick and Towanda. It would be my second Clever Model structure built entirely of cardstock (see the blog entry on "Fun with Paper" for the details there. Once I had replaced all of the houses I then sketched out the roads in town between the tracks and the backdrop.
The plan is now to focus on the roads and get them nearly complete (including sidewalks). I'm going to use the same techniques I used to build I-80, so take a look at that for details. Here's a couple of photos of the roughed in roads and sidewalks prior to weathering and finish paint work.
You will notice that all of the roads and driveways look like they were put down at exactly the same time (and very recently!) - that just doesn't happen in real life. A couple of your neighbors may go in at the same time and have their driveways done by the same company on the same week, but more often then not each roadway has its own distinctive look and age. One of the next things I'll do is rough up the pavement and hit it with a lot of gray. I'll also insert "patches" and potholes and cracks. Now's the best time to do that while I can easily move buildings around and don't have trees and other scenery to deal with.
And it's time once again to put on the painted lines which I roughed in by hand using a couple of paint pens. It's actually starting to resemble a small town. Paint, trees, shrubs, walls and some other accessories are really going to help it feel right.
I've run out of Smooth It, so the roads going north of town are going to have to wait for a while. Once the roads on the south end of town are done, I'll attack each individual building lot from the backdrop up to the tracks.
I'm going from back to front to minimize the amount of time I'll be spending repairing things - you're inevitably going to brush up against something you don't want to screw up if you are reaching toward the back of the layout. The first house lot will be the green bungalow at the top of the hill. I've decided this Craftsman bungalow is going to be owned by someone who loves flowers and planting beds around their home. The whole back yard is going to be a big stone planting bed with a bunch of color. We'll see how it turns out. Here's the roughout of the lot with paint and rocks, and then the house added.
Added some grass - simply slapped a coat of glue down with a brush and sprinkled a Woodland Scenics turf blend where I needed it.
A fence, trees, planting beds and even flowers to add. While I'm waiting to purchase some stuff for the flower beds I attacked two homes (the gray and pink ones) across the street using the same sort of method. I also put a stone wall against the sidewalk for the pink house. Lots more detail work to go with all three of these houses, but just getting the base coats and grass down quickly gives a good idea of how the rest of the town will look. By the way, my ideas for painted flower heads didn't pan out - couldn't find any good foliage bunches at either Michaels or Joann's, but I did get a lot of colorful paint. I took a look at what's available online, and there was a flower sampler of 168 bunches in a bunch of different colors that looks fantastic for $13.99 and I put an order in. Take a look at these!
Sometimes low-budget ideas just don't work out when it comes to scenery and it's just better to bite the bullet. I really think rows of flowers on the stacked wall behind the bungalow is going to look spectacular. I'm also going to add some in the front yard near the rocks, and add some shrubs around the front porch, and I'll still have quite a few available for the rest of the town's homes.
"The Flowers are here! The Flowers are here!". My much anticipated purchase arrived today and even though I'm battling a major turnout problem on my track, I had to put some of these flower clumps up on the planned flowerbed behind the green Craftsman. The clumps are already pre-adhered, all you have to do is pull a clump up with a pair of tweezers and plop it on a bare spot and you have instant flower plants. The pix below took only about 15 minutes to accomplish with the addition of some foliage clumps and clumps of moss. I also added some in the front of the lot and added some planned shrubbery (built from moss clumps. I'll eventually also be adding some mulch beds, a fence and a few trees but I'm really happy with the results so far.
I also added some in the front of the lot and added some planned shrubbery (built from moss clumps and added some mulch beds, a fence and a few trees, a guy on the porch - I'm really happy with the results so far. Decided to name this residence after my in-laws. See the blog entry devoted to that (" The Wilson's moved in - there goes the neighborhood!".
I next attacked the house across the street. I decided that the back yard needed something - decided to build a pergola on the back wall. Pergolas probably weren't found very often in White Haven in 1976, so I figured it was the influence of an Italian family that owns the pizza shop downtown. My wife's been reading a book with an Italian family - the Martinelli's. So, this house belongs to Luigi and Rosa Martinelli.
My dad built a pergola over our back patio a few years before they sold it and moved into a stone house down the street, so I had a pretty good idea about what went into the construction - it's basically a post and beam framework, but how do you do that in scale? The beams and roof structure were a couple pieces of balsa wood I bought a Michaels. I cut pieces to approximate size and mounted one against the back of the Martinelli house. Unfortunately, I forgot to notch the beam to accept the perpendicular beams so I had to notch that out while glued to the house which was more challenging.
Then glued on the top beams and glued supporting vertical beams to the side of the house and under the outer beam.
... and added supporting braces. The braces were tough to get aligned due to their small size, but I found a pair of locking pliers worked pretty well using CAA adhesive that sets in about 10 seconds.
Next I cut the "roof" timbers, painted them an Espresso brown and mounted them.
Then I thought about how to get a "vine" growing up the cover the roof. I pulled some light green fiber clusters and pulled it apart to get a vine structure going - I then sprinkled on some yellow ground foam to simulate some blooms and painted a stone patio under the location of the pergola.
So, it was time to add shrubs and trees to round out the Martinelli property to finish it up.
The next portion of the town I want to finish is across Berwick Street - the block with the church on it. There's a very small lot for a white company house that's up the hill from the church, the church itself and what I'm calling the parsonage. Behind those houses are a couple more homes. My first task was to build a wall that borders the sidewalk. I made this one curved to hug the sidewalk at the base of the hill, so I went back to the Styrofoam well and used some thin high density board that I'd cut on a bandsaw, and shaped it with a foam cutter to parallel the sidewalk profile. I also located the church and fabricated another section of "stone" wall that runs from the sidewalk to the foundation of the church. I also needed to build a stone pier to support the porch on the company house at the top of the hill.
Added some Sculptamold over the plaster cloth tonight in the areas for the parsonage and the blue house. I'm starting to realize that winter's almost over - and that means it'll soon be time to get outside and work on my yard again. I like doing that, but it's also going to mean a lot less time to work on the railroad, so progress is really going to slow down...
And slow down it did. It's now the last week in March. I've put down 8 pickup-truck loads of mulch on my landscape outside and I'll have to mow by the end of this week. I have had some brief moments to work on White Haven. As reported in the last paragraph I did get the base layer down and painted everything a neutral earth color.
I then layered in some grass for the individual lots (hit them with diluted glue and then sprinkled on the turf). The shabby company house at the top of the hill got browned-out unfertilized grass while the church and the blue house got a vibrant green. The parsonage got a bit less green and a bit more brown.
It's now time to add detail. For the company house at the top of the hill I decided to put a clothesline in the back yard. The people that live there (I'll call them the Staples family) are probably quite poor and wouldn't have a dryer. First I needed some supports to sink into the ground. Rather than build them like the pergola (the beams would have looked too large), I dug into my boxes of scrap plastic parts for potential supports and found exactly what I was looking for - the remains of an old farmhouse porch. I cut out two T-shaped supports and painted them up.
That was good, but how was I going to integrate the closeline between them? I decided to get my pin vise out and drill some hole that would accept thread.
I ran thread back and forth between the two supports and tied off each end. Instant clothesline.
But how about stuff to hang out on the line? I cut out some sheets, shorts, pants and shirts and painted them. The sheets can hang off the line, but I'll have to devise some way to secure the other stuff to the thread. It'll probably be just glue, but it would be nice to make some sort of clothespin. I'd also like to hang a clothespin bag out there too.
May update! I've been working outside on my garden beds and haven't had much of any time to work on the railroad until this weekend when it's raining. Spent the morning working out there but when I came in for lunch I had no motivation to get wet again. Decided to do some more work in the north end of White Haven. I got the clothesline out and want to install it, stuck some glue on one post and inserted it into the foam without too much of a problem, but when I tried to do the same thing in the scenery closer to the layout the post snapped off. Tried to super glue it, but it didn't have any structural integrity. Disgusted, I let it collapse on the layout and got another good idea. This house is one of the roughest looking in the neighborhood, why don't I leave one of the posts in a collapsed state? I then don't have to worry about clothespins or laundry and I can add some weeds around it. Perfect.
I then put some strategic trees to disguise the rear of the layout. The tall tree really disguises the fact that the brown house is only about 1/2" deep.
It's now June, 2021. Astoundingly, this blog entry is now almost two years old and we're still working on the town of White Haven on a space about 6 feet long and 18 inches deep. I like the detail work and getting things looking "right". I have been spending some time on some of the fine detail on this block. Some pictures:
As you can see, I've added some trees along Berwick street, I've done some fill on the sidewalk to meet with the wall in front of the parsonage. There's also a marquis on the front of the church between the front door and the window (I simply printed what is currently on the same church in White Haven (it's a Presbyterian Church) and shrunk it to the right size using some software I have. I also added some red flowers out near the curb. The green house next door is the parsonage (it's another paper kit that I put together). The parson's kids like to play basketball, so there's a hoop in the front yard that I made by cutting off a stem of sedum, gluing on a couple of horizontal supports (balsa wood), cutting out a semi-circular piece of cardstock. The hoop was a little tricky, but I found that bending a paperclip in a circle and running the two ends of the paperclip into the sedum support and adding some glue worked nicely. A little orange paint and it was done. Maybe someday I'll have a net, but it'll wait.
... and here are the backyards. The downed clothesline is at the top of the hill along with an outhouse behind the tree there. I populated the stone wall with a few plants and flowers, added a gravel driveway in the back of the parsonage. The hedge that runs along the road was actually pretty easy. I cut up some Woodland Scenics foliage clusters into long rectangular prisms using my Exacto knife and glued them to the layout along the road using my scenic adhesive. If you look at the front yard of the parsonage you can also see the front of the basketball hoop. It's a simple little addition but it adds a lot to the look of this town. I also like the look of the roofs on each of these houses. The problem with a lot of plastic roofs is that look like plastic roofs - shiny and one color. Roofs don't look like that, even when they're new, and it's simple to fix. Get some gray and black paint, paint everything a flat gray and then add some darker detail. Think about how water flows and add darker streaks where more water flows down the roof. I decided to add an outdoor kitchen to the back yard of the blue house. Back in the 70's it was pretty common to see outdoor chimney's with a grill section (I remember my grandparents having one), so that's what I decided to build. Cut it out of a block of styrofoam and simulated some stone block, painted it gray and added a grill top using a section of door from one of my completed paper building projects. Pictures follow.
I liked the look of that, but what else would be in a backyard with an outdoor kitchen? A picnic table of course. I thought about building one out of balsa or styrene and then did a Google search. Etsy.com had a seller who had some LaserArt tables and chairs. Reviews were very positive, so I thought they'd be worth the investment. While I was at it, I also bought some dog house kits. The same seller had some flowers and foliage as well as crates, blocks, bricks and other detail parts. I'll have to visit their store again (turns out it's in Europe and I'm hoping the shipping's not going to be too long to wait for. Anyway, until I get the picnic tables, dog houses and/or chairs built, I'm going to hold off on finishing this block (I'll be adding more trees and shrubs once I get the table and chairs (and probably figures) positioned.
The outdoor kitchen chimney got me thinking quite a bit about my grandparents on my mom's side. I think I shared in some other section of this site that Grandma and Grandpa Baker lived in Bucks County and their property touched the Pennsylvania mainline running between Philly and New York. I didn't see a whole lot of freight moving, but I certainly heard (and felt) the GG1's busting down the tracks with passenger trains - in Penn Central livery. My grandparents had a small house where they'd somehow raised seven kids. One bathroom, 4 bedrooms upstairs, no air conditioning. I remember sleeping over there in the summer and sleeping out on the porch which looked right out on Radcliffe Street in Edgely. The backyard and outbuildings were my grandpa's domain. There for a while he made a ton of planter boxes and birdhouses. Grandma was the knitter - I can remember plenty of blankets that kept me warm on winter nights. Anyway, I've decided that the Bakers live in the neat blue bungalow with the outdoor kitchen. I think they would have been happy there.
The trip down from the Poconos also took us near a lot of railroad traffic. The Erie Lackawanna ran through Monroe County and through the Delaware Water Gap which was one of the primary routes Dad took - we'd enter New Jersey and then loop down to Trenton and then back over the Delaware river into Bucks County. We'd run near tracks for the CNJ and the then not too long abandoned Lehigh and New England Railroad, and even the Lehigh and Hudson before we got to the Pennsy mainline. When we took the route that stayed in Pennsylvania, I'd see Lehigh Valley, Lehigh and Hudson, and more abandoned L & NE trackage. Especially memorable were the multiple railroad bridges crossing the Lehigh River at Easton where it entered the Delaware. Then when we got to my grandparents' house, there were always opportunities to walk out to the tracks and watch trains go by. I guess that's really where it all started for me - my love affair for railroads.
And here we are, June 2021 and I thought I'd take a photo looking southbound down the tracks to see the difference between start (when I laid some of the structures on the flat section of plywood) and the current...
While I'm waiting for things like picnic tables and dog houses to finish the Baker house and the parsonage I moved my focus back to the south end of town and the brown two-story and the lot that holds it. The lots in this section of town were always going to have to have retaining walls and I was getting tired of the same old, same old vertical cut wall type. I decided that the back yard was going to have a winding path of steps that would lead you into the woods and up the hill behind the house. The path would provide the space for some segmented walls of hand-laid stone and there will be some shrubs and flowers and maybe an outdoor patio space. Anyway, that's the concept.
I started implementation by laying out the path with a pencil.
I then mixed up some Sculptamold (not a whole lot, but enough to lay a rough draft of the finished product). Note to self - one I continue to have to learn. Sculptamold has a fairly quick setup time. If you don't put it in place within a couple of minutes, you're left with a bunch of crumbly plaster that isn't good for much. I of course mixed too much up for what I needed for the path and walls. While I was shaping it into place it was setting up and hardening.
Anyway, I got the rough path and walls laid with that batch. I ended up forming a lot of it with my fingers and a piece of styrene. I'm not sure how good it's going to look, but I'll let it cure overnight and start painting tomorrow evening. The nights after work this week are going to be rather hot and sticky, so this is much more enjoyable than weeding. Here it is with some paint. Actually the paint was still wet when I took the picture - the white flecks are reflections off of the wet paint.
I then got to thinking, I could try to make a water feature running down from the back corner to a pool at the base of the hill. In order to do that, however, I needed to create a couple pools to hold the Realistic Water. I used some of the spare Sculptamold (those are the white boulders in the photo below) and glued it in place to form a dam.
It was time for more paint and then pouring of the Realistic Water. I painted the new boulders and carefully dripped some Realistic Water where I wanted it. There was a problem, however. The area right behind the big white boulder at the bottom of the slope had a hole that allowed the liquid to drain to the bottom of the layers of styrofoam block. A little silicone in the hole solved that particular problem. I repainted and added a little detail to the rock and added some flowing water detail, but I couldn't really get a decent photo focusing on the water feature. I also added a driveway to the lot running up from the street.
I have to support a test program out near Pittsburgh this week, so I will not have any time to working on the layout. I've also started a louvered window project for the exterior of my house, so I could easily see a couple of weeks where nothing gets done on the railroad. But I'll be back.
Got my shipment from Hungary and put one of the picnic tables together quickly. Decided that I wouldn't even paint this one. The flat on the right is the table as delivered, the one on the left is assembled.
And here it is behind the Baker house.
...and things always look better with people in a town.
I also got three dog houses from the same seller and elected to put a small one behind the parsonage. I have to say for as small as the parts are, the dog house went together quickly. Slapped on some paint and she was ready for the hound.
I then added a few trees around the parsonage and blue bungalow.
It was then time to return to the lot with the water feature. I dressed some of the stone with shrubs and flowers to force your eye to accept that there was a path up the slope, put down some ground cover where I'd later put trees going up the slope and put down grass.
I also decided to do something different about the terraced stone wall that runs along the front of the property. I was getting a little sick of the same old look and tried to replicate ivy growing along the wall.
I then threw up some trees to cover the back of the lot. I still need something in the front of this house for interest, but I then turned to the adjoining lot because it would also have trees behind it. I got thinking.... wouldn't that be a great place for a treehouse! I documented that in its own separate blog entry, but here's a picture of the end result.
I dressed up the front of the brown two-story....
and then turned my attentions to the lots closest to the train tracks. I was getting tired of building stone walls out of styrofoam, but nonetheless it is an easy and inexpensive way to get a quick result. The Robinsons got a big think chunky wall, while the house next in line (a little Victorian bungalow) received a two-stage wall with what I think might be brick on the top section.
I then hit the Clever Models website again, this time to download their 8' fence. You buy the one-page design for it and you can print out as many pages as you want to make an infinite length fence. In my case, I wanted to put a fence up between that Victorian bungalow and the Robinson's, to include behind the house. This house is a replacement. My original plan had a ranch house here, but this house just fits a bit better on the available property. I also played around with orientations and actually flipped this one 180 degrees so the porch is in the back.
I decided to wrap the property in this fencing. Put together a bit of it and took a look - Looks good and it's different.
Different is one of the things I'm looking for to try to camouflage the steps of styrofoam that make up the hill. The properties are also so close together that I need to break up the sight lines so things just look bigger - this is one of those lessons I'm learning as I build this town on a hill. I've used forced perspective (making things like roads decrease in width as they get further away from the front of the layout), used backdrops that seem to recede into the distance, and now breaking up the sight lines by putting things in front of other things. All of these techniques trick the brain into thinking that there's much more to the depth of the town than the available space. The end result is something to be pretty proud of.
I decided to break open the package of mailboxes that came in a few weeks ago. The little details are what really make a town look like a town. Each of the mail boxes needed to painted (they came in gray). I painted each support post either brown or black and then selected a color for the box based on the color of the house it went with. I dab of CAA adhesive on each post, hold it in place for 10 seconds and there you go. The photo below shows some of them.
After finishing the mailbox installation it was time to add some more trees to the properties adjacent to the Robinson lot. I also put together a table and chairs for the Victorian bungalow to put off the back porch.
And (for now), this block is finished...
I'm developing plans for the next two houses along the tracks (the bright blue and bright yellow). There's not much space on either lot for a whole lot of stuff, so I figured I'd try cramming a whole lot of small details into each lot. I got thinking specifically about the two Victorian bungalows and remembered the kit they came in had a whole lot of extra knick-knackery with it. The details were cast metal objects and required detail painting. One of those is a motorcycle. There was also a bunch of picket fence (also cast). So, detail paint is what I did for a good portion of last weekend. I also decided that the parking lot between the Victorian and blue two-story above needed something to keep cars from careening down the hill and onto the tracks. I cut some short wooden beams, embedded them in the rock and then cut a piece to go between. See the photo below. If you compare this photo with the previous one you can also see a ladder, a propane tank and a lawn mower - all painted detail parts that came from that kit (a DPM Gold kit, Emery Lane (kit 404)). That's a good one if a bit on the expensive side.
More Sculptamold. Like I said, there wasn't much space on either lot to do a whole lot of scenery, although I decided that the blue house would have a shared driveway and would need some steps to get up from the ground floor to the driveway. I also decided the walls for both lots would be stacked, flat stone. The blue house is owned by a carefree couple (The Weeds) who have warned their kids not to walk off the back porch into the path of an on-coming train. The rest of the neighborhood thinks they're nuts and they ought to at least put up a fence like the sensible widow who lives next door (Mrs. Potts) in the yellow Victorian bungalow with a while picket fence encircling her property. I think I'll also try to put a set of clothes on the clothesline that comes with the house kit.
Change up! The blue house wasn't working for me. After fretting for a while I decided the lot just wasn't big enough for a 2-story house and I swapped it for a green and white prairie house which I quickly did a bit of weathering on. I also hit all the Skulptamold with a layer of dirt (brown paint) and did some work on the rock walls and stairs.I also decided to hit the top of the red upper wall of the Victorian bungalow with some gray to take the "glare" off the wall and make it a bit less "vivid".
Grass, details (in this case that included a white picket fence that came with the Victorian bungalows (metal details that were painted), touchups, a sidewalk on Berwick Street, a crossing arm on the corner, etc., etc., etc. I really didn't use any new techniques, but the pictures below show some of the results, and that finishes the town between Berwick Street and I-80. Next to attack is the Auto shop - have to get some cars to put in there, and I'm doing some research to find something cheap. Diecast stuff is at least $13 for each car, but I did find some 3d-printed cars and trucks that should work for about $5 a car, but I have to paint each and every one. I also bought some grass clumps in a variety of colors to spread around the layout. More work!
Photo below shows the stone stairs that ascend to the parking area of this property. I need some shrubs to frame it. I like the somewhat subtle attempts to quickly weather this house (the roof, the look of pigeon crap on the second story window frame, some of the dark streaks under the windows on the first floor. I also like the quick treatment I gave the foundation which no longer looks like plastic uni-color. It's also good looking up the street giving the impression that there's a good deal back there (complete illusion!).
...and here's the start of the picket fence around the Victorian. The crossing arm is in as well as the sidewalk. I love the play of light and shadow in this picture.
... and here's the same shot about a week later. The clothesline is up in Mrs. Potts' house and there are now more trees on the block.
While I'm still adding some details to the houses near the tracks I also decided to start scenery on the auto garage across Berwick street. I've documented the structures over there in the "Fun with Paper" blog, but it's now time to start integrating all of the pieces together over there. The lot for the garage isn't deep, but it is longer than most of the other building lots in town. I'm including the garage itself, a dumpster, an oil shed, oil and fuel tanks, a trailer home, some cars to be worked on, and some junk cars as well. The cars to be worked on have been ordered and need to be painted when they get here from China.
This is going to sound familiar, but I put down my base layer of Sculptamold on top of the plaster cloth. I also added some plaster rocks and glued them in place before painting everything a dark brown. I was going to add all of the details, but then I started thinking about how to finish the rest of the town to the north (right) of the garage. The ceiling bumps down there and there isn't a whole lot of room to maneuver - the best location to work on the rest of that area was reaching over the garage property. If I'd have planted trees there, I would have been trying to reach over them to get to the unfinished lots. Rather than have to do a lot of scenery maintenance, I postponed adding the details in the garage lot until I was pretty close to finished on the rest of the town. The shot below summarizes the work on White Haven to date (well over 18 months now). The brown surface is the garage lot and you can see the cluster of buildings north of town up over the gray retaining wall.
Of course, that mean positioning buildings, working on backdrops, roads, etc. Using my tried and true technique of working on the most distant elements and working forward, I began the north end of town.
Since I'd been working on the I-80 girders to support the interstate over the Lehigh during my vacation in South Carolina, I also spent some time working on the bridge abutments to support the girders and decking. Here's a shot of some of that progress.
I got back to the northern section of town. Here's a shot of the groundwork - plaster cloth coated with Sculptamold, brown paint, some roads and driveways, and green-painted polyfil attached to the backdrop with some spray adhesive.
After a bit of cleanup I started in the far back corner and worked on the lots that are just in front of the backdrop. From a standing level you're not going to be able to see much detail, so a simple lawn, some trees, a few foundation planting were all I have planned here. So here's a shot without adding any trees yet:
I did place some simulated shubbery at the base of the backdrop to hide any imperfections and give the illusion of even more depth. You can also see one of my backdrop photos behind the white house for the same reason The grass is sprinkled on Woodland Scenics fine turf, the brown mulch near the blue house is actually coffee grounds, and the foundation plants are Super Turf. I laid down a layer of wood glue and stuck everything on top of that. The bright green plants on the right side of the driveway I procured from China a few weeks ago. I think I bought five different lots, but 3 of them had plants that were all but impossible to get off of the backing. There is a house that sits to the right of the blue house, but I found the Sculptamold wasn't level enough there and had to add some more which might be dry tomorrow. Once I get all three houses in place I'll add the trees for each property,
and then I turned my attention to the houses nearest the tracks. Again, because they aren't very visible from eye level I didn't spend too much time adding quirky details to these lots - houses, lawns, shrubs and trees - maybe an occasional bunch of flowers.
I then turned my attention to completing the garage and auto shop right near the tracks adding gravel, painting stone, adding ground covers and all of the detail parts I've built or bought for that lot over the past six months or so. Picture below:
I may add some trees (kicking that idea around), but I love the spartan feel of the place. The paper models (the brick garage, the trailer on cinder blocks, the shed and the oil and fuel tanks) work really well. The picnic table, the junk car pile, the junkyard dog on top of his dog house, the vehicles, even the plastic 3d printed dumpster go together well. I envision this as being owned by a middle-aged guy who was kicked out of the house and the only thing that makes his world go around is his business. He's living out of the trailer and spends all of his waking time in the garage helping people get their cars running.
There are a few more things to be done on the west side of the tracks here in White Haven. There's the westbound span of the I-80 bridge, the scenery underneath that, and the Lehigh Valley RR Engine house. Each one of those in good time!