B Y C H A N
A non-portable, portable layout



Late July 2009:
The first few bits of what I would actually call 'modelling' have now taken place. The easiest has been a repaint of the Hornby Lyddle End station building. I made some investigations into station building colours for ex-GWR lines (which as it turns out weren't painted a whole lot different to the original GWR colours), and have hopefully managed to repaint this building into something more suitable for a South Wales line.

 

I've also weathered down the brickwork a bit. I still think it needs a chimney really - although it's sold as a 'waiting room' to be attached to a larger station building in the Lyddle End range I'm using it as the entire booking hall/station office building so I would have thought they would have a fire in there to keep warm during the winter. One to think about. It also needs signs and posters, and for those I splashed out a whopping £1.50 for these from Station Signs:


So those will be going on at some point. The other structure that I've been working on is the goods shed. This is a Peco kit, a particular favourite of mine as I like the general shape and look of it. I wanted a very run down, weather beaten look for this, and Google images came up trumps here with suitable searches via 'old wooden shed' and the like. The kit has been assembled as per the instructions, but I wasn't keen on the overly heavy drainpipes, and having had a look around on Google again it appears there were numerous examples of goods sheds without any drainpipes at all so I just left them off. Several different paint applications to suggest heavily weathered wood, a slight hint of green on the door where paint used to be, and a Preiser figure plonked in the doorway and it's pretty much done.


 


This took several evening's work to get the numerous greys and grubbiness, but I'm pleased with the outcome as it's exactly the look I was aiming for. These photos are pretty cruel close ups, it'll look better 'in situ'. The only other item I've been working on is the Peco platform edges, but these aren't the most exciting items to look at so we'll see those later when they're in place on the layout.

And that's the next job - completing the platform area. Behind the platform needs some landscaping with more pink insulation foam and Sculptamold, and then the platform itself will begin to take shape. The other job I've done is ballasting, which is now complete, but I've not taken any photos of that yet, so the next update should have some more progress on that score.


 Early August 2009:
Having forgotten to take photos of the ballast before it was all painted the nearest I've got is this section near the tunnel mouth. This was masked up with newspaper for the ballast spray painting (to avoid getting spray onto the tunnel mouth) and this section will be painted by hand, but it does at least provide the a 'before & after' shot.



The bits to either side are sand, I'll come back to that later on. The ballast was painted with Humbrol brown ('light earth' to be precise). I can't say I'm overly keen on this colour, I thought it was 'okay' on Folding but it doesn't look as effective here. I'm going to weather it up a bit to try and improve the overall appearance.

The actual ballasting technique will be familiar to most modellers (although it's interesting how many have a variance here and there on the basic method) in that I apply the Woodlands Scenics ballast, get it into shape using my index finger, a spatula and/or a brush, and then use a plastic pipette to drop a solution of 60:40 water:PVA glue onto it. The action of dropping the solution onto the ballast usually displaces it in places, so I do a follow up 24hrs later and plug any gaps or holes. For Bychan I wanted to try and emulate some of the prototype pictures I've been studying and not ballast the sidings. I tried this to some extent on Folding in that there isn't any ballast as such, just an overall ground cover, but with Bychan I wanted to make more of a distinction between the running lines that would have been kept ballasted and the sidings where just earth was used to keep the sleepers in place. You can see the sort of thing I have in mind in this photo - on the right are the sidings, no ballast at all, with the running lines on the left fully ballasted:




With this in mind, I ballasted the running line and the runround loop at the station, but for the sidings I 'ballasted' using 'No More Cracks', a strong, plaster-like material normally used for filling holes and gaps in walls. Having then placed masking tape over the pointwork I sprayed the track with the Humbrol brown. The tops of the rails need to be kept free of paint so that locos can pick up their electrical current and some modellers wipe the rail tops clean the second after spraying, but I find you can leave them for several hours and still be able to easily scrape off the paint with a suitable piece of plastic (I use an old flat bit of kit sprue) without damaging the rails at all. This overall brown colour showed up some further gaps and holes here and there, so a third application of ballast was required. Overall, this hasn't been my best piece of ballasting I have to say, but it's about 70% there and should look better when more 'in situ' with scenics and everything. The 'No More Cracks' hasn't quite managed to deliver the effect I was after, I think I effectively 'ballasted' with it when I should have used it more as a base - in other words, the sleepers are in it instead of being on it. Never mind, it's not a total disaster and a lesson learned for the future.

 

More pieces of pink insulation foam were added behind the platform area and then covered with Sculptamold which was then adjusted and sanded to get it into a rough shape. To support the platform surface towards the back I glued some strips of Funky Foam onto the polystyrene to bring it up to the required height. The plasticard platform top was then attached to the platform edges using Superglue and attached to the foam at the rear with ordinary polystyrene cement.



The final job was to Sculptamold over the edge of the platform at the rear.



The look I'm aiming for has been inspired by this picture of a platform that blends into the embankment behind it:



Sculptamold was then thinly spread across various parts of the ground here and there, including a section alongside the running line where the slope was too pronounced. I ended up with a ballast shoulder that was way too big - it extended about a scale 5 feet outwards - so I cut this back and boosted the slope up a bit to make it a bit more realistic. I mentioned sand earlier and you can see this added here and there as a ground 'filler' where the Sculptamold had holes and pits. Once suitably sieved and agitated so that the very fine stuff comes to the fore it's a very useful general ground cover and will take paint well, and against the Sculptamold should give the ground a bit of added texture here and there. It's applied like ballast, just get it into place using your finger or a brush and then drop over some water/PVA mix to fix it down.



Looks grim, doesn't it?! Things are about to get better though, as the next stage is really just a big painting list - paint all the Sculptamold into suitable earthy/ground colours, paint the backscene, and paint the platform top.


 Mid August 2009:
The black lines you can see in the photo above left was my initial thinking about where to add a dry stone wall. Some trials with the Lyddle End Cotswold wall sections I was planning to use showed that I'd need to create a level 'shoulder' for them to sit in, so just when I thought the Sculptamold was done & dusted it had to come out again.



And with that final bit of landscaping done it was time to get the paint out and turn the landscape into something a bit more Earth like.



The backscene was painted a grey colour using ordinary white emulsion with a bit of black (from a tester pot) mixed in, and the landscape was given a coating with brown ready-mixed poster paint... which didn't turn out anything like the colour it looks in the container! I think the white Sculptamold base lightened it up a bit. I don't mind admitting that I was not too confident at this point, but tried to remember that this was just a base colour.

Next up was the dry stone wall. I had got several packs of the Lyddle End walls cheaply off eBay and this included some granite stone walls as well as the Cotswold ones, so with a mixture of colours, join lines between the sections to disguise, and a bit of building up of the landscape required here and there, it was time for  - yes - more Sculptamold. I used polystyrene cement to stick the wall sections to the landscape and then filled in any gaps, which meant we ended up with this frightening mess.

 

I was confident that the wall could be turned into something decent but the landscape just looked plain wrong, so I used some brown tester pot emulsion and some more grey to add some colour here and there. The wall was painted a dark grey as a base colour, and the platform top was given a first coat. But... there's no getting away from the fact that the whole kit & kaboodle looked really quite grim indeed at this point!



Final painting before beginning the scenics involved a second coat onto the platform surface and then a last minute decision to create some rock faces. The dry stone wall was given a dry brushing with a light grey to highlight the individual stones, and at least this looked okay.



So as we reach the end of August it's not looking good. While the platform and dry stone wall look fine the overall landscape is a 'challenging' colour, and it looks like a landscape from a horror film instead of a slice of South Welsh hillside. Scenics next.

 End August 2009:
 This is the make or break stage - if the scenics don't look good then everything up to now will have been wasted.

I was after a neglected look for the front area so this has been treated with hanging basket liner - this is available for a few pounds from the local DIY superstore. Coat the area with neat PVA glue, cut up the hanging basket liner into pieces and stick it 'hairy' side down, and then a few hours later remove the backing to reveal overgrown bushes/shrubbery/grass. A good trim with scissors to tame some of the longer sections (and to make it more realistic for N gauge), and then I blobbed some dilute PVA onto it here and there and sprinkled on some static grass. The sections behind the platform were also coated with PVA and static grass was applied using the Nock 'puffer' bottle. A few more bits of static grass were applied around the buffer stops and alongside the sidings.



Down at the other end more static grass has gone into the fields beyond the dry stone wall and I've also covered the top of the tunnel. I used two different shades of static grass, preferring the lighter shade as the primary coating and then using the darker shade as a highlighter. Once this was dry I then applied some PVA and stuck some Woodland Scenics fine 'clumping' to represent heathery-weedy-bushy stuff. A long shot of the layout shows a much changed view from earlier photos above. A useful lesson learned too - don't panic too much about the base colour, anything broadly brown seems to work just fine.



And that was August. Looking ahead the scenery needs to be completed with some touching up of the static grass and scatter being applied, and beyond that the buildings will go in. Starting to look like a model railway now.