WOOHOO! Good weather = time to build

[doctorwayne]

....I really like the idea of the train disappearing from view, but what was holding me back was a certain amount of fear in how to do the foreground industries properly. I'm not sure if I like the idea of the "reverse backdrop" building. Do you have any on your layout? Perhaps a photo of how you did it? I'm certainly open to suggestions and your commentary is well taken. I just need some help in coming up with some ideas.

Oddly enough, I can think of only two areas on my own layout where I've used this device. :oops:

I'm not sure if this first one even counts, but the runway for this overhead crane had to be much longer than the available space to make it at all believeable. As I had no other area that would be suitable, I chose to model the most interesting part (the crane) and "suggest" that its runway extended several hundred yards to "who knows what" beyond the front edge of the layout. The oilhouse siding, just to this side of the runway, also extends to "elsewhere".

   

The other one is the Evell Casket Company, shown below. It's a five-sided polygon, sliced off at both the backdrop and the aisle. While not rail-served on the layout proper, it is supposedly serviced from one of the sidings below the staging yard seen beyond the backdrop (there are three reefers sitting on one of those tracks).

   

The main purpose of the structure was to fill an oddly-shaped piece of real estate and hide the opening in the backdrop where the track gains access to those two sidings (along with a seldom used track, on a 5% grade, which permits the layout to be used for continuous running). A third purpose was to use up parts left-over from a kitbashing project. Modelling only the "street" side allowed me to include this prototype structure which I recalled from my childhood, and had seen only from the street. (Even as a five-year old, I thought the name oddly appropriate.)

A good way to help visualise a cut-off structure for the near side of the tracks is to imagine it as if you were viewing it from the layout, either looking along the track, as below:

   

or if you were looking towards the aisle:

   

(I know, there's not much to be seen in that one, except the usually-unseen side of the water tower and parts of the town which is across the aisle.)

This view is of the normally-unseen side of the Evell building (on the right), looking out from the access track mentioned, to one aisle directly ahead, beyond the curtain-wall building.

   

In other words, imagine the entire building or business, then model only the amount of it which is trackside and which will fit into the available space. I can be a rail-served business or not, too, as at least part of its purpose is scenic.

Wayne