Grand Ave

Grand Avenue is Jeff's focus area. The inspiration for Grand Ave comes from the many similar railroad over road scenes found on the Grand Trunk Western (which Jeff models) in the Detroit area

. In the above image Jeff has use masking tape to delineate the limits of Grand Ave.It looks like one of the wood risers that hold up the track roadbed will have to be moved.

Here is a ruff look at how the scene will look. Jeff has made 3 castings of the concrete arch abutments for the railroad overpass. Jeff likes to use Alumilite for making castings.The casting were made taller than necessary then will be cut down to size later.

Here the curb and gutter has been installed as well as the sidewalks. The road and sidewalks are made of styrene and will be installed once the abutments, walls and bridge span are all properly finished and painted.

More foam and primed track

Jeff rolled the module outside so he could spray the track with primer. He uses ordinary primer in a rattle can on the ties and rails.

Here is how it looks with the primed track. We learned later that the primer is a bitch to get off the rail-head when its time to clean track for operation.the next time track is sprayed with primer the rail-heads will be cleaned off immediately. There is quite a bit of light blue foam visible in this image. Randy and Richard have been very active in altering the shape of the fill that the roadbed is on.

More foam work

More land form ruffed in with foam insulation. The Oatmeal box is a crude place holder for where we think an interlocking tower could go. - Mark

While there isn't any switches on the upper level, we chose to include an interlocking tower to suggest that there once was. A common occurrence in the prototype, a tower beside a junction that no longer exists. We were thinking of building the tower so that it looks unused as an active tower but used for something else like the office of the local signal maintainer - Mark

The hill side is closer to its final shape. There will be a road that runs parallel to the track on the upper level. This road will come down the hill and intersect the other road which goes beneath the tracks. The masking tape deliniates which side of the road will have a sidewalk.You can see the track has been spray painted with grey primer. Jeff then adds color to the ties with washes of acrylic paint. This technique was new to me and worked great. The texture of the ties really came out, however getting the primer off the rail head was enormous work.

 Lesson - if you use primer, clean it off the rail head immediately after painting. Never the less, I will be using this technique for coloring my track in the future. - Mark

Airplanes have nothing to do with this blog.

The title of this post should clarify things a little for those who stumble into this.
 My good friend Joe Balint built some HO scale model railroad modules to fit into layout of The North Carolina Sipping & Switching Society's layout. These modules are to say the least, unique. Their design includes two 12 foot long modules that raise the track 3 1/2 inches and two more modules than allow the mainline and industrial track (called the 21) to cross over the mainline plus the 21, twice. The 12' long modules we refer to as ramp modules and are named "Mohawk" and "Allegheny". Then there are the other two modules we refer to as flyover modules and they are named "eastern" and "Piedmont". The names of the modules come from 4 of the five airlines that flew into Raleigh-Durham Airport back in the 1970's.
Our task was to get as much scenery on these modules as possible before the NMRA convention in Atlanta. Jeff Patterson and I did most of the scene planning and much of the scenery construction. We had substantial help from Randy Costanza on scenery and structures, Ken Anderson assembled and painted a very cool structure, as did Rob Cutman. Also Richard Raburn, Mark Nugent, Sam DeShong and Joe Balint assisted. with various scenery projects.

I have invited Jeff and Randy to join me in captioning the images. I thought it would be neat to hear the design perspective of the other major players in this endeavor. My hope is that they will also provide details on how they created their parts of this project. - Mark

For starters we have the modules "Eastern" farthest from the viewer, connected to "Piedmont" nearest the viewer. A cardboard mock-up of an elevated highway can be seen on "Eastern". In the end Jeff and I decided that the highway wasn't going to work and that a more conventional scenery plan would work better for the modules. The final plan for the scene was for an older commercial/industrial neighborhood, several early 20th century brick storefronts and scenic clues to the adjacent industrial area. - Mark

Grand Ave is marked out to pass under the upper level mainline. Jeff will be working on this element.

Two very crude mock-ups of buildings as they might sit beside Grand Ave.

Additional roadbed is being installed. We decided to add the roadbed  to show where there was track and now was just ballast and a wide bridge over the road. The abandoned roadbed is installed so that if Joe chooses to install some working track, he can. The masking tape delineates where another road will pass beneath the upper level track. - Mark

The land form is being glued in and shaping the foam insulation has begun. A cardboard mock-up of a road under the tracks can be seen just right of the hillside. You may have noticed we use a large number of dumbbells  for weight while glue dries, Jeff has lots of dumbbells but they get used far more as glue weights than for pumping iron.