Finishing the backdrop, part two: the town scene

I wanted to include some town buildings on the backdrop behind the Thomaston station, freight house, and transfer tracks, so I chose a backdrop from LARC Products called "Steeple" that had several wood-framed houses and a church in the mid-distance, with a meadow in the foreground.  There were two complications to deal with on this section.  First, the tall foreground trees meant for a lot of finicky knife work to remove the sky portion. It took nearly seven hours just for this 9' section, spread out over several evenings.

Second, the sky in the "Steeple" image is very pale, almost white in fact. Even though I'm removing the sky portion, the hints of sky visible through the tree branches were too much of a contrast with the blue that was used to paint the sky, so I decided to repaint the sky to be much paler toward the horizon.

This time I used three colors: the same Benjamin Moore "aqua marina" and "jet stream" plus a 1:1 mix of "jet stream" and white for the lowest band. The bands were brushed on and then blended while still wet.  Here's how the bands looked before and after blending; the colors look different because the "before" photo was taken at night under room lighting while the "after" photo was taken with daylight coming in the windows.

After the new sky dried the background image was applied. LARC offers three choices of material: a 4 mil vinyl, a 7 mil polyester they call "Fab-Tex", and a more rigid 10.5 mil "anti-curl" material. The first two are self-sticking.  I chose the 7 mil polyester and was glad to find that it was very forgiving. It practically smooths itself during application, and it's even re-positionable so that you can take it up and reapply it if you do it wrong the first time (which I certainly did!). Here's the result:

Most of the buildings look appropriate for the late-twenties to my eye, with the exception of a couple of houses behind the station that have a more modern swing set and pool that will need to be hidden by foliage. Also, the beige building between the transfer crane and freight house is reasonably period-appropriate but somewhat distracting, so I will use small trees to partially hide it.

I'm really pleased with how the backdrop turned out. While I would hesitate to use the sky-removal technique on a larger layout, for a small shelf layout like this one it was manageable.  

Finishing the backdrop

Before starting the scenery I wanted to add some landscape features to the backdrop. I like the look of photo backdrops, so I bought two backdrops from LARC Products: one for the town and another for the more rural scene with the trestle and crossing. I had LARC re-size their stock images based on some digital mock-ups, and also asked them to flip the rural backdrop because it looked better that way.  They were great to deal with and turned around revised proofs very quickly. I would definitely use them again in the future, particularly since they have such an extensive collection of stock images.

The two backdrops had very different sky colors, so I cut off the sky from each of them and pasted the landscape onto the existing painted sky backdrop. The LARC material is self-adhesive so installation was very easy. Removing the sky from the rural section went relatively quickly, but the town scene was more complicated - that will be the subject of another post.  I had the best luck using curved cuticle scissors to cut along the sky line and then a brand-new #11 blade to do the detail work, especially around the large tree on the left. 

The standard gauge track running into the backdrop will be at least partially masked by trees and tall grasses.  For the area behind the trestle, I plan to add a photo of a stream, using foliage to mask the edges of the photo. The next photo shows a mock-up of that scene using a black-and-white copy of the creek photo. I wasn't thrilled with how the original backdrop looked in this area so I'm also testing an unused scrap of backdrop to see if it would look better, which I think it does.

Two new boxcars (or is it three?)

Needing a couple more boxcars, I ordered two Kennebec Central boxcar kits from Mt. Blue Model Co.  Why KC and not an SR&RL prototype like the boxcar already on the roster (#35)?  The shorter length and more basic look of the KC cars is more in keeping with the idea of a less-developed railroad like the Kennebec Central or Monson RR, compared to the boxcars used in the later decades of the SR&RL.  A side benefit is that the KC cars are quicker to build since they only had a couple of grab irons, no stirrups, and handbrakes instead of air brakes.

The new cars were numbered 23 and 24.  For variety, I weathered #23 heavily but left #24 pristine, as if it was recently repainted.  To reinforce that idea I used a smaller font on #24:

The idea to use smaller lettering on the "repainted" car didn't occur to me until after I had already lettered one side.  After debating which side I liked better, I had another idea: since the layout is a shelf layout and only one side will be seen during an operating session, why not number the two sides differently, so that the car can be flipped around occasionally to represent a different car?  So the number on the reverse side was changed to 25, giving me three cars for the price of two!

As with all of my freight cars, the trucks are from Marsh Creek Miniatures and were 3D printed by Shapeways.  Some two-foot freight cars only had brakes on one truck, so to replicate that look I removed the brakes and frame extensions from one truck on each car.  

The Marsh Creek trucks are designed for Fox Valley Models 36" N scale wheelsets (20" in HO) with .540" axles. The FVM wheelsets are hard to find at the moment, but I learned from another modeler that Eastern Seaboard Models is now producing wheelsets of the same dimensions.  I ordered some to try on these cars and they look good and roll well, so it's great to have an alternative to the FVM wheels.