Of Trees and Track

I'm always fearful that my posts about the design of the next layout might give the impression that I'm not actually doing any real modelling.

So here are the meager fruits of this weekends work.

I'm not sure but I think this is my first ever completely scratchbuilt tree. The wire was from the scrap box and rather thicker than that normally advocated. You can see the bare armature, coated with hot glue, in the current header photo of the blog. I sprayed it with Plastikote Manhattan Mist stone paint, which is one of those handy products for adding a bit of texture in all sorts of situations.

The tree is intended to disguise the sharp bend in the backscene behind the station building, and seems to work for that purpose.

This is certainly the first hand made track I've tackled since my OO9 days. In those days I used copperclad sleepers. For this I've gone back to riveted ply because that's what my disastrous attempts at EM track building in my teenage years used, and I wanted to lay that ghost to rest.  I'm not actually planning to use this technique on the layout itself, but I wanted to make sure I could do it if I decide I need to use rivets rather than C+L chairs to strengthen the points. Oh, and I had some FB rail I wanted to make use of.