Llanrhaiadr Mochnant in Glorious Colour!

I was whingeing recently in my comments on Geoff's excellent  article on good yard textures about how difficult it was to recreate colour from black and white photos.

It is typical therefore that almost immediately afterwards I found this set of colour photos of Llanrhaiadr Mochnant.

£15 for each high definition download is a bit steep if you ask me but even the preview versions have provided me with some useful information. I'm glad I found them now rather than in a year's time because they've corrected my understanding of a few points. In a particular I'm really pleased to find this shot of the shed with the fuel pump next to it. I think it will make a nice cameo.

I'm certainly a lot happier now I know more about the colour of the goods yard and after another couple of washes I think I'm getting closer to the right effect. I need to do something about the vegetation around the edges. It would appear to need to be a darker green than the grass behind it and more weed than grass.

The Grass Grows

I wasn't happy with the grass on the disused platform. Checking back to a photo of Blodwell Junction suggests in real life it the grass was a lot longer and the bushes had encroached a lot more.

So it was out with the Noch static grass again this lunchtime to try and improve the look of things.

This is one of my favourite shots of the layout to date.

I It looks a bit better than this in the flesh. However I do find static grass always ends up looking much lighter than I expect. I still need to add some bushes on the platform, and the join between the grass and the platform edge seems to have become move obvious.

I've added some vegetation at track level as well but that needs cutting back once the glue has dried if only to clear the point rodding. Ah yes, the point rodding. The MSE version is so delicate my eyes have to look for it in the photos of the model, whereas it is very prominent in prototype photos.

Hedging

Just in case you think I spent the whole weekend pontificating rather than modeling.

The hedge is now in place, made from teased out hanging basket liner, sprayed and then sprinkled with foam.

The platform now has a covering of static grass to reflect its disused status, though I'm disappointed that it has come out very bland compared to my test piece, so I need to revisit it. I've also re-foliaged a so-called premium tree.

I suspect I need to build a new version of the weighbridge hut. The window looks OK in the flesh but is revealed as terribly crude in photos.

Talking of which, here are some more photos:

Plastikote

Plastikote and Rustoleum make products that are really useful to two types of people.

The first are the truly creative crafty type who would use the Plastikote Manhattan Mist  Stone effect aerosol to turn a polystyrene sphere into an attractive table decoration.

Thne there are those of us who use these sorts of products to cover up our mistakes.

This, of course, has got nothing to do with any recent work on the platform and goods yard. Nothing at all.

Success and Failure

When will I learn that rushing is never a good thing?

When will I remember lessons I've already learnt before making the same mistake again?

When will I just accept that sometimes things look worse as you begin to make progress?

So what has brought all this on?

Having a 1001 things to do this weekend I thought I would keep the work on the layout straightforward and just assemble the station building and lay down the surfaces for the goods yard and the platform. One of those jobs went well, the other two considerably less well, and the overall result seems to highlight so many other things I'm dissatisfied with.

I'm struggling to find anything I like about how the layout currently looks.
The odd pieces of hanging basket liner are a desperate attempt to find
the right profile to blend with the backscene

The station building looks OK to my eyes, certainly a lot better now it is in a basic coat of matt black and in-situ where it isn't going to be subject to much close scrutiny.

This is how much of the station building will normally be seen

Ignore the back scene corner for now....

 What has gone badly wrong is the ash/gravel surfaces. I was going to use a Polyfilla , Chinchilla sand, black paint and PVA glue mix, laid on a surface painted with PVA. The idea of the PVA is to keep it all flexible and avoid it cracking. So, despite the bottle being right in front of me guess which of the ingredients I forgot to include?

The Mistakes Keep Coming

When it comes to the buildings I seem to end up easily confused by the different variations on the line being both right and left handed. I seem easily confused by left and right at the best of times and would have to confess that I've more than once forgotten that the different ends of the buildings should be mirror images and ended up with two identical right hand side ends.

Today I put my "make the hole fit the window" idea into action - and this time I got my top and bottom confused when measuring so the windows in the station have ended up rather higher than they should be.

I also had fun with the goods shed. First of all I've noticed I put the bearers for the end canopy the wrong way round, which is why the angle is steeper than it should be.

My usual technique for painting Wills sheet is a blast of matt black, dry brushing with Royal & Langnickel's  Pearl Black to simulate bare sheet showing through, and then a quick wash of Modelmates Rust Red. On this occasion the wash seems to have given a much stronger rust effect which I'm going to have to tone down.

Sticky Fingers

Well today didn't go as well I'd hoped. I broke my golden rule of not continuing with something  once I've realised I'm not in the right frame of mind, and with the dogs yapping and whining this afternoon I wasn't in the right frame of mind for fitting the canopies on the goods shed.

A tension lock coupling drawing attention to itself 

In fact I discovered I've built an unavoidable twist into the canopy over the railway line, but since it isn't visible without the aid of a mirror I've decided to live with it.

Honestly the canopy doesn't droop that much

In fact even the angle in this shot is pretty much impossible to see without shoving your head inside the box, and I don't think many people will be doing that as the picture below shows.

One small layout, one giant mess