- Sun Mar 04, 2007 2:02 am
#2528
Thanks for putting up these images of your train collection, man. What scale are these, O?
When I was a kid, living in Phoenix, AZ my old man helped me build a 10’x6’ table that we bolted into the wall of a pretty big room at home. We used a jigsaw to make long cuts in the board to create smoothly graded, sturdy inclines, and I bought some crap called ‘Mountains in Minutes’ down at Hobby Lobby to surface terrain with.
That came with some latex stuff you could paint over real rocks and then fill with this goop you mixed up and poured into the rubber molds. The goop became foam that filled even the tiniest of contours in the molds, which peeled away for further use.
That was kind of a new thing back then and not easy to use because you had to mix the goop in an open container and pour it…quickly. The detail it created was killer, though, especially like areas of eroded strata outcroppings or places where it was supposed to look like the land had been excavated (or whatever it’s called) for the rail line. We did a lot of traveling and camping, as well as dirt bike riding in the desert outside Phoenix, so I had no trouble finding rocks that offered a wide variety of convincing miniature surfaces to make rubber molds from. The standard then seemed to be plaster, so the lightweight alternative of foam was also better, as well as the intricate cracks you could achieve. The instructions for that junk said to fill your molds, and then build with your 'rocks', but I thought it looked more natural, less redundant, to hold the rubber molds against the structural skeleton and pour in the foam junk.
It must be a lot easier to get that sort of result these days, since there are so many products out there that just spray foam out of a can with a tube attached. To be sure, I don’t know what they make for buildings layouts these days. I don’t do anything but look at model railroads online.
That was an HO railroad layout that I financed with my paper route money (what I didn’t spend on Star Wars BS). It had a control station from which all the switches and stuff could be operated. It could run two trains. Pretty big deal for a little kid, I guess.
I also guess that at the time I expected to live in that house forever or something. But before I even finished that layout—not that you ever really do, but before I got far enough along with the thing to be able to continue without a decent hobby store at hand—our family moved to some town in Joklahoma where there wasn’t much besides a Sonic drive-in restaurant, a Pizza Hut, a gas station, and a small grocery store. What a change. Suddenly something as simple as watching some drunk broad barfing all over everyone else on the Zipper ride when the carnival came to town seemed like excitement. No Internet back then, not a commercial thing like now, anyway, where you can shop for whatever you want. It was a long, long way to the nearest train stuff store, and I didn’t really have any way to know where one would be in the first place, so I didn’t rebuild the layout and stopped playing with trains.
I was already in my thirties before I even knew anything about computers or used one at the library—kind of funny, since my old man’s career was teaching computer stuff for the U.S. Postal Service. But once I found out about the Internet and bought a PC, all I saw online tempted me to get back into model railroading. Places like that YouTube where you can check out people’s model RR vids are trying to give me the bug again. I rented this four-bedroom house last year (no wife or kids here, just me), so now I have to think up reasons not build a train layout in one of the larger rooms.
I’ve been trying train game demos on the PC to see of that’s any fun, and I tell myself that that’s a lot better than building a layout (less expensive and doesn’t take up space). I must be kidding myself about that being better, though. I suppose there’s no comparison, really. Two totally different things. Build a layout and rig it with cameras. That’s got to be the thing to do, I guess.
Thanks again for posting pictures of your collection, man. What scale are those, then?
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- By Dr_Kirk
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