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Not 100% certain, but I *think* this might be N scale.....The cutaway view is probably the only chance I'll ever have of seeing the inside of a suite-class stateroom. The "Magic Carpet" on the starboard side is motorized and moves up and down (much like the prototype) The small green patch is a pool table, but a foobie since the prototype actually has black felt Cheers,Ed
Debuted in November 2025, the Celebrity Cruises Celebrity Xcel is one of five active Eagle-Class ships that were constructed by the French ship builder Chantiers de L’Anttique.With a prototype length of 1,072 foot 10 inches and a prototype beam/width of 127 foot 11 inches, an N-Scale replica would scale out to be 80.463 inches long with a 9.594 inch beam/width.
With the yards tracks having received their primary colour a few weeks ago, I am now starting on the detail painting. I ended up respraying the tracks at Septimus as I was not happy with the initial application, so I started the detail painting there. Here I am applying a dry brush of flat white on the ties:The first thing I noticed was the big space between ties where the turnout ties turn into track ties. I hope you're not just going to leave that space to the left of your paintbrush??? It needs another tie under those big ol' rail joiners. There may be other places on your other turnouts and track sections where that's needed also. I have a method for minimizing the intrusion into track detailing that "normal" sized rail joiners do that may interest you. I'll do a little write-up about it in the morning when I get out of bed and post it in this weekend's update.Although I like the highlighting the dry-brushing does on the wood grain of the ties, I'm not crazy about it highlighting the thingies that should be spikeheads that hold the rails on to the plastic ties. This is Atlas55 flex I assume, and I am hoping you're planning on more paint-weathering that will minimize what is one of the main detail drawbacks of the Atlas55 flex...great big attachment thingies that hold the rails in place. I also completed my 30 degree crossing with the addition of wood ties and a reinforcing copper tie in the centre, and the adjacent sections of straight track:Really nice job on your PCB crossing and track sections, although I'm not familiar with the "odd" construction of ties on either side of the crossing where the straight tracks match up to the diamond rails. My UP/SP Common Standard drawings don't have anything like that, just ties that aren't perpendicular to the rails at those point, but complete rail-to-rail ties. Different railroads did thing different from each other, but I find that interesting.Now, I am hoping that you are planning on filling the PCB copper cladding gaps with a filler of some sort. Because they are so nicely and uniformly placed on every PCB tie, the uniform gaps will function as a bright red flag to your eyes so that every PCB tie can be easily identified (even after painting, weathering, ballasting, and weathering again) as being different from the rest of the wood ties. I discovered this on photos of my Park City Yard done in hand-laid Code40, luckily after I had only completed a small part of it. Instead of filling and sanding the gaps, I decided on future builds to hand-file them onto each PCB tie with an oval jewelers fine file, so that they weren't straight and deep...but highly irregular and in a different place on each tie. This solved that cosmetic problem for me, but I am going back to fill and sand the existing gaps I cut down the center of some of my PCB ties, and then painting them again, before ballasting.Since most modelers who construct their own hand-laid turnouts and track are conditioned to be neat and orderly, it's natural to put the gaps in the same place on every PCB tie...but, that uniformity attracts human attention like a magnet and we ideally want our PCB ties to look like the rest of the wood ones. Filling the gaps and then sanding them flat helps, or initially making them shallow and highly irregular.On the other hand, if these hand-laid section of track, turnouts and the crossing are to be displayed on project boards for your Model Railroad Engineer certification, maybe you WANT the gaps to be seen and to be as neat and orderly as possible. But, for laying down and using on a realistic layout, they should be as un-obvious as possible.
"The first thing I noticed was the big space between ties where the turnout ties turn into track ties. I hope you're not just going to leave that space to the left of your paintbrush??? It needs another tie under those big ol' rail joiners."
The first thing I noticed was the big space between ties where the turnout ties turn into track ties. I hope you're not just going to leave that space to the left of your paintbrush??? It needs another tie under those big ol' rail joiners.
Although I like the highlighting the dry-brushing does on the wood grain of the ties, I'm not crazy about it highlighting the thingies that should be spikeheads that hold the rails on to the plastic ties. This is Atlas55 flex I assume, and I am hoping you're planning on more paint-weathering
I'm not familiar with the "odd" construction of ties on either side of the crossing where the straight tracks match up to the diamond rails.
Now, I am hoping that you are planning on filling the PCB copper cladding gaps with a filler of some sort.
On the other hand, if these hand-laid section of track, turnouts and the crossing are to be displayed on project boards for your Model Railroad Engineer certification, maybe you WANT the gaps to be seen
I posted a drawing made by Google Gemini in over in this thread. https://www.therailwire.net/forum/index.php?topic=60404.msg832485#msg832485 I took the drawing and created a 3D model. Lucky for me, the car has a deep center sill. I'll see how much weight I can hide in there, with metal wheels it weighs 7.1 grams!Side view. Note how small the car is compared to the Atlas 40' gondola next to it.Space to add weight.Top view with see through grate.
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Topic: Weekend Update 12/14/25 (Read 3168 times)
