Bridgework: River Banks

[wm3798]

Lookin' real good, Lord Z...  It would drive me crazy to work as methodically as you are!

Lee

[DKS]

For that stone effect, you might want to look at something like this--

http://www.eurorailhobbies.com/erh_detail.asp?MN=15&CA=23&SC=N&stock=NO-34861

Dave, I looked at the link, but I'm not sure I understand how it applies, other than showing an example of something that has a stone texture. Could you elaborate, please?

Sorry for the late reply. It's hard to see in the product photo, but it's a kit to make a pier with a cut stone surface that's a pretty close match for what was in your proto-photo, and I thought you could just use the kit as raw material. But since you already found something that works, it doesn't much matter.

[Zox]

Sorry for the late reply. It's hard to see in the product photo, but it's a kit to make a pier with a cut stone surface that's a pretty close match for what was in your proto-photo, and I thought you could just use the kit as raw material. But since you already found something that works, it doesn't much matter.

Ah, okay. I didn't realize it was a kit--now it makes more sense to me. But as you say, I've already gone ahead and done it the hard way.

[Zox]

Few people will ever appreciate the level of crap you are putting yourself through to make the model match the prototype...And by crap I mean fun. 

Lookin' real good, Lord Z...  It would drive me crazy to work as methodically as you are!

Thanks.

Before this module, everything I'd done in model railroading was freelance. Heck, it was mostly outright fantasy--even without counting the giant robot guard at Area 53. When you're doing that sort of work, it's really easy to just make do with whatever's at hand, and declare it "right"--who's to say otherwise?

That's why I'm being so "methodical" with this module. I want to prove to myself that I can do a re-creation of a real scene, not just a four-foot-long "foobie."

(Which won't stop me from eventually finding a waterline model of Godzilla, to occasionally stand upstream of the bridge and threaten the passing trains.) 

[rochsub]

Excellent work Zox.  Nothing looks better than the prototype modeled faithfully, even to those who do not recognize the prototype.  A scene done this way will always look very believable because it is the truth!

Daryl

[Zox]

This weekend, I managed to get a layer of foamcore put on top of the north-end scenery, to bring it up to the proper level for the road:



You can see the two metal strips I used as "cauls," to apply clamping pressure across the middle of the module and under the bridge where clamps wouldn't fit directly.

Here's the state as of a few minutes ago, with glue drying on the last bits of foamcore:



You can see that, in this case, I'm letting gravity be the "clamp" for the piece on the left. That little container has two or three pounds of fishing sinkers in it.

[Zox]

With the foamcore setting, I spent last night doing some fine-tuning on my road artwork for the north end of the module, and started mocking some stuff into place:



While most of the art is just placeholders, the drawing of the road will become the road, so I'm concentrating on getting it right. I'm still working on how to add some of the color variations caused by traffic. CorelDraw is a great package, but its handling of gradients leaves much to be desired.

Adding the foamcore seems to have brought me up to the right level.

Live:



Memorex:



Unfortunately, as I do more work on the terrain, it's gradually becoming impossible to match some of the camera angles from my photos of the real bridge. I simply can't get the gigantic-in-N-scale camera lens close enough to the ground. I know there are techniques I could use, but they're all too complicated to deal with for work-in-progress shots like these.

You'll also notice my road-striping crews are a bit more consciencious than their real-world counterparts. In this case, a little white (actually yellow) lie seems to help the realism. Without the striping, the massive, oddly-shaped chunk of pavement on the module simply doesn't look like a road.

Finally, a low-altitude flyby, showing where the retaining wall is going to be placed:



Unfortunately, there are still retaining walls that need to be done in two or three more places, of various construction styles and states of repair.

They're right, reality is a fractal. The closer I get to being "done," the more details demand to be included...

[Zox]

Given the real-life picture of the road and sidewalks above, look at this:



The curbs and sidewalks are definitely a lighter color than the road in reality. However, in the model picture the printed road and painted curbs/sidewalks are very nearly the same shade.

So, do I need to make the curbs/sidewalks a lighter color, or the road a darker color?

I suspect it's the former, which means I need to research a lighter-colored blend for my "concrete" color...dang it.

(I'm not sure why there's such a color mismatch at the seam between the pieces of "road." I suspect it's differing levels of Dullcote, but I have to buy some more Dullcote before I can try again.)

[Zox]

Well, I've got a new "concrete" paint mix that's a bit lighter than the earlier attempt, so it should work just fine--I'll post some pictures after I start assembling it to the roadway.

And I can start assembling it to the roadway, because I've finally got it ready to go.

Here's an overview shot, before I got everything properly stuck together:



Getting the traffic-wear coloring on the road was a bit of a chore. Corel Draw doesn't handle gradients very well, so what you're seeing is a stack of three objects. The bottom object--the base road color--is 35% black. The second object is 37% black with a wide 36%-black border; the third is 39% black with a wide 38% border. This allowed me to get a 5-step gradient, exactly where I wanted it, with three objects.

After printing the pages, I gave them a heavy coat of Dull-Cote, to protect them and to add an overall "dusty" look, a technique that worked well on a previous module.

The green scissors in the picture have a "decorative" edge that's semi-random. I taped the two pages of road together and cut through them simultaneously to get a non-linear joint between them. It's just barely visible in the picture; once the pages were spray-mounted to the 0.005" styrene base I'm using, it just about disappeared. Given that it's placed under the bridge, nobody's likely to see it unless they go looking for it.

Here's a picture of the mounted roadway, just sitting in place under the bridge:



The car is sitting on the seam.

Also, do you remember that retaining wall from further up-topic?



Check out the bottom picture on page 24 on this link:

http://books.google.com/books?id=KpR1s0sxoMIC&lpg=PA7&ots=ESKW3V7hPP&dq=kankakee%20railroads%20norman%20stevens&pg=PA24#v=onepage&q=&f=true

Look just behind that building on the right-hand side of the road. It doesn't look like it's in exactly the same place, but I'll bet that's where the material for the wall came from--the abutment for the previous version of the bridge.

(I would love to have a copy of that book, but I refuse to pay $220 for a $20 paperback. Hopefully it'll be re-printed at some point.)

[wm3798]

That's a cool evolution of the materials!  Reuse and Recycle!

Lee

[Zox]

Have you ever put a bit of effort into something, and felt kind of proud of the progress you were making, and then realized that you had it utterly wrong?

I was starting to get the sidewalks and curbs into place next to the road, and it was starting to look reasonably good:







And then I found this photo among the research shots I took back in 2006--the only picture, of all of them, that clearly shows the striping on the road:



Boy, did I screw that up. In the absence of definite evidence, I had assumed that this chunk of road would be striped as no passing. Shows what happens when you assume, I suppose.   :-\

So I spent the evening editing this Corel Draw file:



...to look like this:



...so I can start over. At least I managed to catch it before I installed the road on the module...

[bbussey]

Looks good.  Based on your newly-uncovered photo, it appears there are four manhole covers to be concerned with also.

[Zox]

Based on your newly-uncovered photo, it appears there are four manhole covers to be concerned with also.

I hadn't planned on doing those--missing manholes aren't nearly as obvious as incorrect striping, and I'm not trying to precisely match the variations in the road surface.

However, since you pointed them out I'll take a look at it. If I can include them into the printed road in a reasonably realistic way, I'll do so. But if it's going to require separate "3-D" detail parts, I'll skip them for now. After all, if I'm going to have to cut into the road, I can do that as well later as I can now.

At some point, I just need to "git 'er done..."

[wm3798]

Go out to the street in front of your house, and photograph the manhole covers.  Then crop 'em out and drop 'em in!  easy peasy!

Lee

[Rowan]

Very impressive mate.