8 - Practice Makes Perfect

Well, I don't know about perfect but we'll see. As reported in my last post, the scenery kit arrived, so I cracked it open! Since it arrived and this post I have put the basic "box" together and installed the track sub-roadbed. After I let the glue dry for about 24 hours I used wadded up newspaper to fill in the empty space and create the "topography".

Once all the newspaper was pushed, prodded and shifted around it came time to create the lay of the land, so to speak. I must tell you it was a bit messy but not too difficult.

The kit came with a roll of plaster cloth. I cut five 14" pieces, dipped them in water and draped them over the newspaper them starting on the left to right and back to front. Once the plaster has completely dried I'll be ready to start painting.

Oh yeah...on Saturday we went to The Great Train Expo in Puyallup and picked up a caboose, a boxcar, a flat car and a hopper. We have a "real" train now...well it's still pretty short but it's a start! There were a couple cool layouts to oogle at but other than that it was actually kinda disappointing there was a lot of junk for sale there. Maybe not junk, maybe collectors were excited about some of the stuff, but a lot of it looked like stuff people just didn't want anymore. We bought our stuff new from a Tacoma train store that had a booth. We got pretty good deals. Normal prices were $20-$25 and they were marked down to $13-$18. They're nice cars, metal wheels, lots of detailing, the only thing is they have cheap plastic couplers. I'll have to replace them with metal ones with spring actuators like the ones that are on the locomotive.

The actual layout and buildings kits are supposed to arrive on Tuesday to that will be exciting to finally have all the stuff and actually get started on the real deal!