Hello everyone,
I am building a shelf layout based on the B&O operations in Baltimore City. I decided to opt for a relatively narrow shelf as I want to convey a close to the tracks type perspective, so the average width of shelf is 16", and I have 30 feet of shelf built with certain areas a bit wider. I took a few pictures of the area on my layout that are down by the docks and uploaded them to this thread. The pictures are not the best as I need to get used to the florescent lights I am using in the basement, but it will give you all an idea of how things are coming. One of my goals is to be able to operate equipment from different eras, without looking to out of place on the layout. The area in the pictures will be the older part of town, where steam and first generation steam will operate. In other areas {except the waterfront}, I will strive to make the scenery ambiguous enough to run B&O, Chessie, and CSX as there are still plenty of places in Baltimore where they all operated at one time or another. As far as trackwork goes, I will be using all #6 Fastracks turnouts I will be building with their jig. All non turnout trackage will be handlaid with the PCB ties and wooden ties. After admiring other peoples work on the forum, I wanted to give a progress report on what I have been up to as of late.
Thanks,
Stuart
Looks good, Stuart. I especially like the colour of the brick buildings and also how they tower over the trains. I'm really looking forward to watching this as it develops.
Thats a nice sized layout space, your weathering looks very well done.
Lynn
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Stuart, it is looking good already. I especially like that big brick building in your second picture. I remember well your old layout and it was one of my favorite switching layouts, so I am really curious about your new one. I hope you post a lot of pics of your progress as you move along.
Thanks to everyone for their encouraging words. I must admit I was hesitant to post any pictures until I resolve the lighting that is playing havoc on my camera. My old layout benefited from lots of natural lighting but very little room, whereas my new layout has lots more room, but with artificial lighting. I will try to mess around with the white balance feature on my camera to see if that helps any.
As you can see, no track has been laid as of yet, I just put some old scraps of flex track to gauge how much of my track plan will fit in the available space.
The larger brick building is an old DPM kit that I combined with an old discontinued Walthers building that I used to replicate a power plant. There is a similar building still at Baltimore's inner harbor that is now a commercial retail space. The large rounded windows on the kit are similar to what is on the real thing.
The two shelf layouts have yet to be connected into one, but that will be taken care of as I refine my track plan. There will also be an additional 12-15 ft add on to the end of one of the shelfs you see in the pictures.
Once I overcome my photography issues I will post more as I progress.
Stuart
P.S Anyone else have issues with shooting under florescent lighting?
Stuart, most digital cameras have a setting where you can choose the type of light in which you're taking the pictures - the camera then compensates for that particular type of lighting. All of my layout pictures are shot under fluorescent lights (Cool White, too, not the temperature-balanced type) , and, as long as I remember to set the camera properly, including turning off the flash, the pictures look pretty "normal". Fluorescents normally give pictures a greenish "cast", while incandescent bulbs tend to make a coloured photo look orange or yellowish.
art67 Wrote:Thanks to everyone for their encouraging words. I must admit I was hesitant to post any pictures until I resolve the lighting that is playing havoc on my camera. My old layout benefited from lots of natural lighting but very little room, whereas my new layout has lots more room, but with artificial lighting. I will try to mess around with the white balance feature on my camera to see if that helps any.
As you can see, no track has been laid as of yet, I just put some old scraps of flex track to gauge how much of my track plan will fit in the available space.
The larger brick building is an old DPM kit that I combined with an old discontinued Walthers building that I used to replicate a power plant. There is a similar building still at Baltimore's inner harbor that is now a commercial retail space. The large rounded windows on the kit are similar to what is on the real thing.
The two shelf layouts have yet to be connected into one, but that will be taken care of as I refine my track plan. There will also be an additional 12-15 ft add on to the end of one of the shelfs you see in the pictures.
Once I overcome my photography issues I will post more as I progress.
Stuart
P.S Anyone else have issues with shooting under florescent lighting?
What you need for good photography lighting is daylight. If you need to do your photography in doors in a basement where you hopefully don't have literal "daylight", you need "daylight spectrum" lighting. Since you are not going to need the lighting for more than a few minutes at a time when actually photographing the layout, using incandescent lights for photography is not a problem. If you pick up a couple of flood lights from Home Depot or Lowes with and put in "Daylight spectrum" bulbs. I think I would look for the floods that use a screw in type flood light bulb rather than the halogen tubes, since I don't know what the spectrum of the halogen tubes is. Your problem is that the human eye compensates for color shift in artificial lighting, but a camera does not. I would then use one flood light to light the scene and the second one for fill lighting to kill shadows. When you want to take pictures, shut the florescent lighting off and turn on the flood lights only. Being portable you can move the flood lights to which ever scene you want to shoot.
