Freelance 2016-1

[lajry]

Reinhard
Those loads on that bulkhead flat reminded me of steel coil loads. You don't have to have a place that makes or uses them. Like at Santa Fe's Vernon Team use your gantry crane to off load them & fork lift to put them on flatbed trailers. You have a couple of pix of the Vernon crane in your Vernon Flickr pix.

[Catt]

This is one of the things that I miss being able to do in N and Z.I will definitely be doing this when I do the HO switching layout. :mrgreen:

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[faraway]

This is one of the things that I miss being able to do in N and Z....

I am not sure but you know that photo has been taken after the Grassmaster was in action and "before" the vacuum cleaned the mess up? All those fibers are not glued to the layout. Just a small seam left to the track sticks in the glue. This is about the same area after the vacuum clean it up.
IMG_4707 by faraway52, on Flickr

The green done this morning is very different from the others because I ran auf of 6mm /1/4" fibers. A first vacuum application made showed the difference very clear. I pulled the plug and made is different by intentionally applying the vacuum at some still not set spots and fill the holes with brown ground cover and some other green.
IMG_4744 by faraway52, on Flickr
An overview of the area with the replaced team track and the stub track. Both ending at the right side of the photo now. They spanned up to the left end of the photo.
IMG_4745 by faraway52, on Flickr

An other problem are the palm trees. I like them but they limit the theme of the layout a lot. Some small trees are more universal and serve the same purpose. I used small trees I had at hand made for N or Z scale. They had the proportions of oaks etc. with a tall massive stem. I cut the stem and they got the appearance of large shrubs with the branches close to the ground. A form of small trees more often found than the "tiny solitaire".
IMG_4742 by faraway52, on Flickr
IMG_4741 by faraway52, on Flickr
IMG_4740 by faraway52, on Flickr
ps. All my palm trees have a nail in the bottom of the stem. They are plugged back on the layout within seconds

[Catt]

When I had my last HO layout I had a lumberyard where the track looked almost identical to the picture I reposted.I know I could do that in N using short fibres but there is no way I can do it in Z though I plan to try it .

[lajry]

Catt
In Z scale a layer of grass color paint would be as tall as Reinhard's HO grass. LOL

[faraway]

Adding green details. Some of the shrubs on the first and all on the last photo are the residuals found in the shrubs box.

IMG_4748 by faraway52, on Flickr
IMG_4747 by faraway52, on Flickr
IMG_4746 by faraway52, on Flickr

[faraway]

Got a dozen trees in the mail today. Cut off the stem and drilled a nail in the bottom. It is amazing how little is changed by 12 trees.

IMG_4751 by faraway52, on Flickr
IMG_4752 by faraway52, on Flickr
IMG_4753 by faraway52, on Flickr
IMG_4753 by faraway52, on Flickr
IMG_4755 by faraway52, on Flickr

Got the Walthers CP GP9u in the mail too. Plugged the shell on a drive with decoder prepared some years ago for St. Maries River Railroad. Funny thing is that selected drives are not bad at all with a good DCC decoder. The shell is cheap enough to risk a CP project. It is the flexibility of a generic freelance layout I like so much that the palm trees got removed.

[Prairie Trains]

Looking good, trees always add to a scene regardless of how few or how many are used.

[faraway]

I am still working on details of the green.

One topic is to soften the transitions between green and not green. It was all to straight and technical.
IMG_4773 by faraway52, on Flickr
IMG_4774 by faraway52, on Flickr

The other is to take some of the perfection produced with the Grassmaster.
IMG_4775 by faraway52, on Flickr
IMG_4776 by faraway52, on Flickr

[faraway]

It gets pretty green here and I made up my mind to have the palm trees on the (freelance Florida inspired) layout.

IMG_4779 by faraway52, on Flickr
IMG_4778 by faraway52, on Flickr
IMG_4777 by faraway52, on Flickr
IMG_4783 by faraway52, on Flickr
IMG_4782 by faraway52, on Flickr

[torikoos]

And all of a sudden, we've moved from more Northern areas to the Southeast again, it almost instantly feels more warm and humid too, now a small section where you can model some Everglades or other swampy bits with a 'gator' in it, and the tone is set :-) (thinking of offshoots of the Florida intracoastal waterway )

Koos

[lajry]

Really like that there's variations in your grass areas. You could include little trash especially along any roads. It might also include an abandoned car or two. You could also have a public works crew cleaning up the trash or hauling away the cars.

[faraway]

Here we go. Right under the bridge since about two years. I tried trash but the gators ate it all :o

IMG_4787 by faraway52, on Flickr

[lajry]

There's too much good stuff left on the front car like windows, headlights & chrome.

[faraway]

Andy's fantastic grain elevator made me think if a building made of corrugated steal plates could be made of styrene (evergreen 4527) when the ends of each sheet is elevated a tad (evergreen 104).
No rattle can painting today. It is very stormy and it rains cats and dogs at the balcony.

IMG_4794 by faraway52, on Flickr
IMG_4793 by faraway52, on Flickr