I've got two questions as I'm finishing up scenery on my MR. First, how many of you finish the insides of your tunnels. Not sure if I should finish up the plastering inside or just paint it black and be done with it. Or better said, how many of you show off your tunnel's inside as part of your layout.
Question 2: I'm at the point of finishing up my operating drive-in theatre. Need suggestions on gravel to use for the parking lot. Wasn't sure if I should use ballast or some other type of "gravel" for this. Need kind of a bleached out color. I know ballast does come in various colors just wasn't sure if this would be too course for the lot. Many thanks!
1.) I just use black painted cardboard.
2.) I use fine ballast for gravel roads and parking lots. It work fine in HO. Although, if you fine ballast for your track, there my not be enough contrast.
Nick
Take a Ride on the Reading with the: Reading Company Technical & Historical Society http://www.readingrailroad.org/
dont have any tunnels but on my gravel road crossing on my HO layout i used fine ballast
use a gray or one thats as white as possible dont use BUFF like i did its too pink
nbrodar wrote: 1.) I just use black painted cardboard.2.) I use fine ballast for gravel roads and parking lots. It work fine in HO. Although, if you fine ballast for your track, there my not be enough contrast.Nick
For the tunnel, paint it black, regardless of what you line the tunnel with. Foam works fine but so does cardboard and other stuff.
For gravel I use Great Northern Sand and Gravel products. Here's a couple of pictures of a lot.
Engineer Jeff NS Nut Visit my layout at: http://www.thebinks.com/trains/
I put full scenery in my subway tunnels, but the whole idea was to create the right environment for the video camera in the first car of the subway train.
http://www.youtube.com/watch.php?v=dOV9NSqrQlc
I personally enjoy the video camera effect, and as I put more above-ground scenery in, I bring the subway up every now and then and watch the show on TV. It's a big hit with the spectators, too, particularly the kids.
For my subway walls, I used strips of styrene. I took a hint from the textured ceiling, and applied Hydrocal with a paint roller, let it dry and painted it with light gray primer. My tunnels are lighted inside. The video was taken a long time ago, and since then I've added a couple of bright LEDs to the front of the train to improve the lighting.
It takes an iron man to play with a toy iron horse.
I recall visiting a club that had two very visible tunnel interiors, protected with plexiglas. The double track main paralleled the aisle on two different levels. One had been finished with a rough, 'blasted through the granite' appearance. The other was finished with a concrete lining, including safety bays. Both were a couple of yards long, the effect was impressive and only the club members knew that the tracks were on opposite ends of a lengthy main line.
My 'maybe in the future' plan book includes a similar underground diorama of a brand-new bore being cut by an operating TBM. It'll probably get built shortly after I dock the Emma Maersk at my intermodal port.
Chuck (modeling Central Japan - 200 KM from the nearest salt water - in September, 1964)
MisterBeasley wrote:I put full scenery in my subway tunnels, but the whole idea was to create the right environment for the video camera in the first car of the subway train.http://www.youtube.com/watch.php?v=dOV9NSqrQlc
From one "traction buff" to another... Sweet!
Conemaugh Road & Traction circa 1956
Flat black paint throughout and ballast as far as a spectator can see when looking into the portal.
I even have a surprise or two inside. One disused tunnel has a hobo camp inside. It can't be easily seen unless you look straight in. How about a small sign that says "My, aren't you nosy?"
People like humor and small unexpected things. Be creative.
The mind is like a parachute. It works better when it's open. www.stremy.net
larak wrote: Flat black paint throughout and ballast as far as a spectator can see when looking into the portal.
For get the spectator, if I scenic as far as I can see with effort.
But I'd never put any humor on my layout. That would be anti-serious, whimsical, non-prototypical caricature.
Chip
Building the Rock Ridge Railroad with the slowest construction crew west of the Pecos.
Can we assume that this is H0?
1. How much you put into your tunnel(s) depends a lot on where they are and what can be seen from all normal viewing positions.
Humour can be fun... BUT you do not want people leaning over to look into the tunnel! They will catch things with their clothes and limbs.
You may want to think more about how you are going to do maintenance in a tunnel than how you will scenic it...
You do not want to make a tunnel a dust trap, somewhere nice for bugs/vermin to live or somewhere you have to use an endoscope to do any work in... including just getting out a last car that got uncoupled...
Where your tunnel is somehow close to a viewing face of the layout (like if you have a hidden curve in the tunnel) it cn be fun to be able to look in and see the train in the tunnel through like a horizontal mine shaft. (Cut in from the front of the board... as distinct from looking in the tunnel mouth) If you do that it gets to be worth detailing the tunnel wall that you will be able to see. You will also quite likely want to arrange some illumination... LOW temperature!
About the most important thing is to be able to keep up the maintenance on this part of the layout.
2.
Ballast/gravel road surface.
If you can go get some road surface material and a piece of ballast. Hold both in your hand and compare all three... then look at the size of the hand on one of the figures on your layout.
Ballast does get degraded and get dirt in it.... BUT it starts out passing through a 2" ring in the screening process and isn't much smaller. You would not want to walk around a drive in theatre if it were lossely paved with (old) ballast. (Okay, it's a drive in... ballast cuts up tyres, can be like driving on a shingle beech (or , more likely getting stuck) and when it sprays up is like heavy machine gun ammunition flying about. You'd get a lot of dented cars and smashed windscreens. Also the kid deliverying you popcorn isn't going to be very fast or very happy...
Do you get the idea that I'm saying "go small"?
I would suggest treating the surface as being extremely similar to concrete. It will have been rolled in to a pretty near level solid surface. Drainage will (mostly) be by un-off NOT run-through - which is the way ballast drains on the track. I don't suppose that many theatres want big puddles all over...
So I would look at making the surface with very fine sandpaper glued down onto a flat or very-near flat sheet surface (ply?).
Hope this helps.
This is HO scale, forgot to mention that. I purchased some fine grade ballast in light gray yesterday and it seems to look pretty good. I do sift my groundcover a second time with a fine strainer and you'd be surprised on how much doesn't make it through the screen. I went ahead and built up the parking lot humps and just need to cover the lot but not before adding the speaker poles that hopefully I can get to light up.
The two side by side tunnels I have are curved and about two feet long. The top is made to pop off for maintenance and uprighting derailed cars. I thought about putting in a hobo camp or something halarious in the tunnel. The hard part is being able to blend in the pop offs so you can't see any creases or gaps between the top and tunnel itself. So I went ahead and placed the top on an oversized piece of very thin styrene and blended in the scenery. Essentially the tops just sit without any adhesion to the tunnel itself. Thanks for all the great help!
You might like to look here for a load of stuff on hiding/disguising joints...
http://www.trains.com/trccs/forums/988219/ShowPost.aspx
You could also be in a position to hide the join with a hedge line, possibly with a ditch. You can even use men (with or without a back hoe) digging a trench...
All of my tunnels except one are detailed a few inches past the tunnel portals in order to give the illusion of a solid mountain. For the one tunnel that is visible all the way thru, I used WS tunnel liner castings painted flat black.
Have Fun.... Bob.
Steve,
An interesting read, especially the tunnel comments as I am builing mine now.
Whew, I built the mountains, really liked them, used some paper rock homemade portals and stopped cold. Why? I realized I need to 'line my tunnels'. OK, so I built some 'paper and cardboard' liners. I fitted them in from the back. Yuk, the paper portals looked awful. ANd the lines were only a bit better.
So I purchased some plaster portals and fitted them to my paper liners. Even more yuk! So I built some styrene liners and started installing them and the plaster portals. Ready to glue it down and stopped cold again. I needed to paint the styrene tunnels which turned out to be no trivial task as the acrylic paint bubbles on dirty plastic. (First time I tried to paint any styrene with acrylic paints you know). OK, painted lets glue. Oh no! The track needs to be balasted but the roadbed needs to be painted first.
At that point, I was glad my mountains were light and removable, so off they came, and I started ground up.
Never did I realize it was so involved in making mountains and portals and such. But boy do I like the results.
I'll post some pictures later, gotta run!
Joe Daddy
HAZMAT9 wrote: I've got two questions as I'm finishing up scenery on my MR. First, how many of you finish the insides of your tunnels. Not sure if I should finish up the plastering inside or just paint it black and be done with it. Or better said, how many of you show off your tunnel's inside as part of your layout.
From the far, far reaches of the wild, wild west I am: rtpoteet
On the layout my dad and had we built our mountain against the wall and punched through to the next room for our tunnels. We built a shelves along the wall in the adjoining room for the track, so we only had 6 to 10 inches of actual covered tunnel. The adjoining room was a storage area so normally there was no lights on in it to flood out of the portals. We used a U shaped piece like from a cereal box cardboard painted black inside for the tunnel linings. (Shelves, we had tracks at three different levels going through the wall.)
For drive-ins I think I can remember two in the Seattle area that were gravel. That sort of pit run (as I know it) maybe 3/4" crushed gravel with a finer gravel bits or sand mixed in. Used quite a bit for asphalt underlayment. When people where leaving after the feature there would be alot of dust in the air and more time was give between the first and second feature than at paved ones. When I was stationed in Colorado, there was one outside Colorado Springs that was oiled gravel, almost like some county roads. Not enough traffic on to smooth it out. I like the thought of painted sand paper for the lot. Would it be to brittle to make parking berms? More hill at the front closer to the screen than the rear by the snack bar, cars closer to the screen had steeper parking angles than those toward the back.
For very large gravel areas, fine masonry sand or for a finer grit silica sand works. The silica sand being much ligther will take gray washes better if thats the effect you want.
Any time I find areas that will eat up too much expensive ballast, I will spread the sand first and glue it down. Then the ballast as a top dressing. This is mainly done where there lacks roadbed between double track and areas of yards where it is too much trouble to add 1/4 filler strips. Some club members have ballasted entire yards with the sand. The important thing is the washes/ staining and top dressing for cinders etc. I like Joe Fugates method of the powdered tempra paint and dilute and let soak into the ballast. I haven't tried this on any large areas yet.
Modeling B&O- Chessie Bob K. www.ssmrc.org