Here's a photo that includes several updates all at once. First, some initial scenery is now in place, including dirt, grass, and ballast in the transfer yard area. Second, in the distance is the freight station, which is now finished and installed. It will be shown more clearly in a future post. Third, I starting making some granite loads that could have been plausibly carried on two-foot flat cars. And fourth, I've been experimenting with LED strip lights for layout lighting, which will also be the subject of a future post.
While Maine granite was popular for buildings, columns, and monuments, other common products included paving blocks and curbstones. These latter products seem more suited to a two-foot gauge railroad and will be the primary cargo on my layout.
The curbstones shown above were made from basswood and scale out at roughly 9" x 16" x 5'. Nine inches is too thick for curbstones so in the future I will use thinner stripwood. I rounded the edges with sandpaper and then dunked the pieces in diluted white primer followed by a dark gray stain to give them the final coloring, and then assembled them into stacks with scale 3X3 blocking underneath.
The loads shown here would have weighed between 8 and 10 tons by my calculations, which is right around the capacity of a two-foot flatcar. The standard gauge flatcar on the adjacent track is a 50-ton car so several narrow-gauge loads could be transferred to a single standard gauge car.
I plan to make paving blocks the same way. An HO scale paver would be around 1/16" x 1/16" x 1/8", so for flatcar loads it may be easier to carve a larger basswood block to represent layers of pavers, instead of making each load from dozens of individual stones. I'll still need a lot of individual pavers though, since I want to have piles of them lying here and there.
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