River Valley: Town

I started doing some mockups of the River Valley town module. It's going to be very minimal if I can help it, a couple buildings or a couple houses at most. Just enough to convey that there's a town. I can't decide if they highway should be "Main Street" or if the highway should be perpendicular to it.

The real meat of the town will be the co-op and scrap yard built on a quad module and irregularly shaped S module. Placement of things here is more straightforward, obviously the elevator and fertilizer shed go on the elevator spur, and the scrap yard office somewhere on it's spur.

Bean Field Module: Beans and Weeds

This weekend I was able to get some more work done on the bean field module. All of the scenery bits came from a Woodland Scenics Landscape Learning Kit, except the gravel shoulders on the road which were made from Buff Gravel and the weed clumps that are grass sifted out of some Scenic Express Farm Pasture Blend/

The bean field was done by squirting stripes of white glue on the top of the ribs created earlier and then dumping a bag of medium green coarse ground foam on. After the glue setup I knocked all the loose foam off and viola! a bean field (kind of). I'm not totally pleased with it but its ok for now. I'd really like to get a whole bunch of Blueford Shops corn to try, but this is an awful big area and would be quite expensive.

All of the ditch ground cover is blended fine ground foam, with some clump foliage bushes stick on here and there. It was much too uniform so I also dusted on some burnt grass and yellow grass ground foam to break it up. The tufts were made by putting dollops of white glue on a piece of aluminum foil and then sifting the grass out of the pasture mix onto them. It worked pretty well but not great.

I test ran a little, and posed for a few photos. The operation was pretty lame but photos turned out good. By far the most complete railroad I've ever done, and it's only 12" long! Looking forward to getting another single started, hopefully this week.