I’ve been making some progress on the Windsor St Yard layout. Nothing incredible, but necessary nonetheless.

Much of the recent layout work has involved painting: painting the yard office, painting some of the ground, and painting track. Here you can see the yard office, with newly painted brick.

 

 

 

 

Yard office work also included changing the windows. The Walthers modulars that I’m using use the common industrial window arrangement with many small panes. For the office itself, I wanted simple double hung windows, which means modifying all of them to remove the mullions. This is a tedious task that involves snipping them out, then filing everything nice and smooth. It’s a good thing I have my iPad to keep me company while doing this. I’ve gotten through a LOT of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.

 

Next up was painting some of the mainlines. In Lee’s original plan, the section below was hidden and not visible, so it was never really worked on. It will be visible here though, so I opened up a bottle of “chocolate” craft paint and set to work.

 

 

I also painted the pit tracks with “Bittersweet Chocolate”, a darker shade that should blend nicely in with the muck that I’ll be building up around them.

One of the next steps is going to be grouting in the various empty areas. Before I did this, I needed to cover over some of the gaps remaining from where the section on the right formed a drop leaf in Lee’s old layout. I covered the area over with masking tape, then painted over it with the bittersweet chocolate paint I use as general “muck” color.

The gap filling also included some areas under track and scenery. This was accomplished by folding strips of tape over a few times and then sliding them in the area. They then expand to fill the space, and should stop the future grout from slipping all the way through.

Here’s an overview of the area facing the old turntable area.

Lastly, I started mocking up the Interstate 83 bridge that will bisect the yard. This happens in real life, and will provide a nice way to hide the fault line that got created when the layout moved. The real bridge can be seen here.