I was getting ready to build the building for Wolf Home Products at my Windsor St crossing and realized that I had made a big mistake. So I fixed it.

The key part of my scenery construction methods is “scene composition”: creating realistic scenes for scenery to fill. Getting it right means making things look right. Getting it wrong and you’re hoofed. A fundamental aspect of this is basing whatever you’re doing on reality. In that vein, I heavily refer to tools like Google Maps and Streetview to “fact check” what I’m doing. I was doing this in the case of the Wolf building at Windsor St to make sure I designed it correctly. In doing the research for it I discovered that I was getting the whole scene wrong!

Turns out that the real Windsor St isn’t exactly perpendicular to the tracks. It’s actually at a 10 degree angle. That might not seem like much, but it does make a difference in how the scene comes together.

Thanks to Google maps, I was able to transfer the exact angle to the layout. I laid my angle gauge on my phone with the map pulled up then applied it directly to the layout.

That let me get the Wolf Building designed correctly and also got me thinking about the rest of the space. So I started planning out what I can do to move things along further. Here’s what I’ve come up with, via Photoshop including the future backdrop. My biggest realization was that instead of using a building along the backdrop on the right I should just go with some low trees and scrub bushes. The only open question in my mind right now is handle to handle the far right corner where the red mill building is. But I think I’m close there too.

One of the exciting things about the new backdrop images is that they’re of the real buildings in the area.

The area to the left in the above photo was shot from the RG Group parking lot in the upper right, and the ones on the right are of the Fabricated Products building shot from the access road along side Graham Packaging. They’re not the EXACT scenes but you know what, they’re close enough for me.