Fall scenery work

I've spent bits and pieces of time during the summer and early fall doing some light scenery projects. I also finished off the New England Farmhouse kit, minus some details once I determine the exact layout placement.

Here is a look a the finished farmhouse from Mount Blue Model Co. And a link to their website.

http://www.mountbluemodelco.com/structures.htm

I have an open house coning up on November 11th (see http://modelrailroadopenhouse.com for a full schedule). With that n mind I've turned my attention to trying to add some scenery into places where it will help make the layout look more finished.

One conspicuous area is the pulpwood loading siding in Whitefield, right along the edge of the layout. I put in dirt, stone and ground cover to finish what was started on the other side of the diamond earlier this year.

Basic ground cover and sone piles of pulpwood go a long way to ,making things look more finished. In that big open area, I'll drop in a piece of foam painted an earth color, until I work out the final scenic treatment.

For the look of bark that comes off the pulpwood, I use tea leaves, emptied from inexpensive tea bags.

Over on the other side of the layout, the Hardwick scene on the Lamoille Valley had scenery put in well over 10 years ago. It even has some details added including figures, vehicles, telephone poles, etc. But as I never worked out the final idea for the quarry and the area between that and the church, I never finished off the scene.

To the left of the church, I placed some structures and vehicles, but this is just painted foam. I wanted to make a more elaborate quarry scene, so I held off doing much else here.

I decided that investing a few hours into making this scene look complete, even if it may not be my final idea for this scene, would go a long way to making this how section look complete. I decided to simply add a gravel parking area where trucks would be turned and stored, plus a small shanty. The rest of the quarry would be further down, somewhat obscured by trees.

It was fun bringing this scene to life, adding the utility poles and wires, and stage a few vehicles. I need to get some appropriate dump trucks but for now I'm happy with the results.

At first I did not have that pine tree at the area where the road leads into the gravel lot. But after adding it it really helped the scene, adding some vertical element to this area.

I have more things to do in the next couple weeks before the open house. I also had a light fixture fail, so that is next up to fix. 

Free-mo pictures from NER Convention

I posted pictures of the Free-mo layout assembled at the NER NMRA Convention in Mahwah, NJ on my Flickr site. Click the link below to view the gallery.

https://flic.kr/s/aHskKefY2b

It was a good weekend. Set up went pretty well Thursday despite a few unplanned physical obstacles. We ran plenty of trains created with the ModuOps software which generates switch lists for the crews. Convention attendees as well as the Free-mo crew ran over 2 dozen schedules trains Friday and Saturday.

There was talk of maybe having Free-mo at the Syracuse convention next September, but that will probably depend on space available. But certainly it was well received again by the convention attendees. Going back the last few years we've had a Free-mo layout at the Laconia NH convention in 2013, the joint MER-NER Mt. Laurel convention in 2015, the Newport convention in 2017, and now this year in Mahwah NJ.