Boston & Maine Ashuelot Branch - 1939

[Bob]

Thanks for answering my question about cutting your window openings - they all look so precise!  I'll look forward to seeing how you paint your brick sheets.  Bob

[garethashenden]

March! I knew this thread had gotten out of date but I didn't realize it was seven months ago! Its so long that I've forgotten what I've been doing. I'm going to do an overview of the current state of things, then we can get into the details on a couple of areas.

Not a lot new going on at Ashuelot Paper.


I have made some trees. They need a little bit of dark green foliage to break up the single colorness, and probably transferal to thicker trunks.


Robinsons papermill has had a basecoat of brick colored paint. Still needs the roof sorted.


We can move quickly through the Ashuelot Depot area, no substantive changes have been made.






The bridge scene, and the neighboring farm, are the other areas I have been working on.







I think the vegetation along the front of the rest of the layout is the only other thing that's really new.







I will do another post with details of the papermill, river, and farm works.

[garethashenden]

In between Ashuelot Street and the river there was a farm. It occupied land on both sides of the tracks. In reality there were a couple of farms, but I've compressed the distance enough that only one makes sense. The barn and outbuildings are from a Branchline Laser Art kit, the house and silo are 3d printed. I'm still negotiating the exact arrangement of buildings, I may try mirroring the house.





I will be modeling two fields, one a hayfield, the other a cow pasture. For the hayfield I wanted the scene to blend into the backscene. I started by painting a light green area down low to represent the field with some dark green tree blobs representing trees beyond. That was months ago, I really need to go back and add some detail to both the field and trees.



I wanted to create a small wet bit, not a full pond but something with reeds and cattails. Clumps of 12mm static grass gave the foundation, plus some coarse foam bushes and a dead wire tree. But like the field it needs some more work on getting the colors right.





I made an attempt at static grassing the field, and it mostly worked. But the area near the backscene didn't work as well as I had hoped. Another round should improve it though.

[garethashenden]

The Ashuelot River is often a gentle flowing stream and at some points in the year its more rock than river. The bigger rocks are plaster casting, the smaller ones are rocks. They were glued in place and all painted grey. The riverbed was painted dark green. A bit of sand was applied to the edges and then vacuumed up once the glue was set. So far I have applied one coat of gloss medium to see what it would look like, but I realized I needed to finish the riverbanks first.





For the riverbank, I laid 12mm static grass in glue overhanging the bank. Once the glue was set I brushed and vacuumed it to remove any loose pieces. Then airbrushed brown, with a hint of grey on top. These make fairly convincing roots.





After that I added a few types of bushes, some prefabricated ones from Martin Welberg and some ground foam. The next step will be trees.

[N Scale Train Boy]

Looking fantastic! Thanks for sharing some updates, I was wondering how things had been going since the NERPM back in the spring!