The installed and painted backdrops make the layout room look bigger because you can no longer see all of it from a single location
The layout room now looks very different because I’ve finally installed all the backdrops on the upper level. All unfinished areas are now covered (except the ceiling), and the sky blue paint makes the room look very bright. In addition to the backdrop around the walls, there’s a short backdrop atop the helix that forms the backdrop for the Benedict loader reached via switchback. I underestimated how much this would change the feel of the layout. Because it blocks the view across the layout, it makes the layout feel a little deeper because you can’t see it all from any one spot anymore.
With such a tall backdrop (24″), I secured the risers for the backdrop to the lighting valance and storage shelf above the upper level
I learned a trick for hiding seams in the hardboard by accident. Like all my other seams, I covered them the best I could with lightweight spackling compound sanded smooth, but it’s nearly impossible to get everything perfectly flat and even across both boards. It just so happened that all three joints in this section were right behind lights–with a light shining directly only the seam, there’s no shadow on any of the uneven joints making the seam a lot more difficult to spot.
The next step is to build the last four bridge sections and put some DCC bus wires in place so I can start laying track in the final section. Exciting!
The raw backdrops of hardboard installed around the edges–all that remains in the backdrop along the peninsula
Here’s a look at last Saturday’s progress including finishing most of the lower level scenery base and painting the rest of the backdrop
I had a happy aligning of the stars on Saturday where my wife was gone for the day, I didn’t have any big “chores” to do, and I had just learned how to paint backdrops! All that combined into a day spent furiously trying to finish up the lower-level scenery forms so I could paint the rest of the lower-level backdrop. It was a good day, and I’m pretty happy with the results. I learned that the painting is my favorite part, roughing in the scenery with cardboard strips is my second favorite, and papering over the cardboard with section after section of red rosin paper is a distant third. Round 2 of backdrop painting went a little smoother than round 1 as I think I had a better grasp of the techniques, and the paint brushes seemed to work better on their second use. I liked the results of round 2 so much I went back and redid some sections of round 1.
The St Charles Local traverses the wye with the newly painted backdrop. It will soon descend through the backdrop in the corner, a hole much tougher to spot now
The scenery covers over the hidden track along the back wall that joins St Charles and the Mayflower section, so I decided to do a test run… I can now verify that I can indeed – by twisting at odd angles, reaching into small gaps, and fishing it out the last couple feet with a long string of hoppers – free a stuck train from the most remote part of my hidden track! Lesson learned–when you use hot glue for scenery, it tends to leave a lot of strings hanging down, and go figure, locomotives don’t pick up electricity so well when their wheels are covered in bits of glue string! A little wheel cleaning and some extra sweeps of the hand through the area (again at odd angles via small gaps), and trains now traverse this area nicely.
Where the two lower-level scenes transition–the backdrop on the right is lower than the left, hence less blue sky
I’ve only got one section left that still needs a backdrop and scenery forms, over the helix from staging. Painting the backdrop in the corner was the big barrier to adding this, so that will likely be the next step, and the LAST step before building upper-level benchwork… it’s getting pretty real.
Here’s where trains will leave the lower level and enter the helix to the upper level–I think the backdrop painting along with a few trees will hide the transition well
